Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854. A History of Emotions

WRITING WAR IN BRITAIN
AND FRANCE, 1370–1854
Writing War in Britain and France, 1370–1854: A History of Emotions brings together
leading scholars in medieval, early modern, eighteenth-century and Romantic
studies. The assembled essays trace continuities and changes in the emotional
register of war as it has been mediated by the written record over six centuries.
Through its wide selection of sites of utterance, genres of writing and contexts
of publication and reception, Writing War in Britain and France, 1370–1854 analyses
the emotional history of war in relation to both the changing nature of conflicts
and the changing creative modes in which they have been arrayed and experienced.
Each chapter explores how different forms of writing define war – whether as
political violence, civilian suffering or a theatre of heroism or barbarism – giving
war shape and meaning, often retrospectively. The volume is especially interested
in how the written production of war as emotional experience occurs within a
wider historical range of cultural and social practices.
Writing War in Britain and France, 1370 –1854: A History of Emotions will be of
interest to students of the history of emotions, the history of pre-modern war and
war literature.
Stephanie Downes is an honorary fellow at the University of Melbourne. She

has published on late medieval literary and textual cultures and their modern
reception, and on various social and cultural aspects of emotions history, including
Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature (2015) with Andrew Lynch and
Katrina O’Loughlin, and, with Sally Holloway and Sarah Randles, Feeling Things:
Emotions and Objects through History (2018).
Andrew Lynch has recently retired as Professor in English and Cultural Studies
at The University of Western Australia, and Director of the Australian Research
Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. He has written
extensively on medieval and modern medievalist literatures of war and peace. He
is co-editor of the journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society and of A Cultural
History of Emotions (2019)
Katrina O’Loughlin is Lecturer in English: Romantic and Nineteenth-Century

Literature at Brunel Unversity, London. She has published on various aspects
of Enlightenment and Romantic literature including Women, Writing and Travel in
the Eighteenth Century (2018) and, with colleagues, two volumes on different
aspects of the history of emotions.
Themes in Medieval and Early Modern History
This is a brand new series that straddles both medieval and early modern worlds,
encouraging readers to examine historical change over time as well as promoting
understanding of the historical continuity between events in the past, and to
challenge perceptions of periodisation. It aims to meet the demand for conceptual
or thematic topics that cross a relatively wide chronological span (any period
between c. 500–1750), including a broad geographical scope.
Series Editor: Natasha Hodgson, Nottingham Trent University.
Available titles:
War in the Iberian Peninsula, 700–1600

Edited by Francisco García Fitz and João Gouveia Monteiro
Writing War in Britain and France, 1370–1854: A History of Emotions

Edited by Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch and Katrina O’Loughlin
WRITING WAR
IN BRITAIN AND
FRANCE, 1370–1854
A History of Emotions
Edited by Stephanie Downes,

Andrew Lynch and Katrina O’Loughlin
Routledge
ROUTLEDGE
Taylor & Francis Group
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First published 2019
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© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch,
Katrina O’Loughlin; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch, Katrina O’Loughlin to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 9781138219168 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781138314139 (pbk)
ISBN: 9780429446245 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK
CONTENTS
List of figures vii

Notes on the contributors ix
Acknowledgements xiii
1 ‘In form of war’: war and emotional formation in European

history 1
Stephanie Downes and Andrew Lynch
2 Confessing the emotions of war in the Late Middle Ages:

Le livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut 23
Craig Taylor
3 Emotion and medieval ‘violence’: the Alliterative

Morte Arthure and The Siege of Jerusalem 37
Andrew Lynch
4 The Armagnac-Burgundian feud and the languages of anger 57

Tracy Adams
5 Violent compassion in late medieval writing 73

Catherine Nall
6 ‘Thus of War, a Paradox I write’: Thomas Dekker and a

Londoner’s view of continental war and peace 89
Merridee L. Bailey
vi Contents
7 Corresponding romances: Henri II and the last campaigns

of the Italian Wars 107
Susan Broomhall
8 Bellicose passions in Margaret Cavendish’s Playes (1662) 127

Diana G. Barnes
9 ‘At Newburn foord, where brave Scots past the Tine’:

emotions, literature and the Battle of Newburn 145
Gordon D. Raeburn
10 ‘This humble monument of guiltless Blood’: the emotional

landscape of Covenanter monuments 163
Dolly MacKinnon
11 Paradoxes of form and chaos in the poetry of Waterloo 183

Robert White
12 War and emotion in the age of Biedermeier: the United

Service Journal and the military tale 201
Neil Ramsay
13 ‘A possession for eternity’: Thomas De Quincey’s feeling

for war 219
Michael Champion and Miranda Stanyon
Index 239
FIGURES
7.1 Autograph letter from Henri II to Diane de Poitiers [nd]. 111

Bibliothèque nationale de France, manuscrit français 3143, fol 2r.
© Bibliothèque nationale de France
7.2 Autograph letter from Henri II and Diane de Poitiers to 117
Anne de Montmorency [1559] Bibliothèque nationale de France,
manuscrit français 3139, fol. 26r. © Bibliothèque nationale
de France
10.1 Frontispiece, [Alexander Shields] A Hind let loose, or An Historical 164
Representation of the Testimonies, of the Church of Scotland, for the
Interest of Christ, with the true State thereof in all its Periods: Together
With A Vindication of the present Testimonie, against the Popish,
Prelatical, & Malignant Enemies of that Church . . . : Wherein Several
Controversies of Greatest Consequence are enquired into, and in some
measure cleared; concerning hearing of the Curats, owning of the present
Tyrannie, taking of ensnaring Oaths & Bonds, frequenting of field
meetings, Defensive Resistence of Tyrannical Violence . . . / By a Lover
of true Liberty. ([Edinburgh], 1687). The Burke Library at Union
Theological Seminary, Columbia University in the City of New
York. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further
reproduction is prohibited without permission
Taylor & Francis
http:/taylorandfrancis.com
CONTRIBUTORS
Tracy Adams received a Ph.D. in French from Johns Hopkins University, and
is Associate Professor in French at the University of Auckland. She is the author
of Violent Passions: Managing Love in the Old French Verse Romance (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria (The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2010), and Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France (Penn State
University Press, 2014). With Christine Adams, she edited Female Beauty Systems:
Beauty as Social Capital in Western Europe and the US, Middle Ages to the Present
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015) and has co-authored The Creation of the
French Royal Mistress, forthcoming with Penn State University Press.
Merridee L. Bailey is the S. Ernest Sprott Fellow for 2018, supported by The
University of Melbourne, as well as an Associate Member of the Faculty of History
at The University of Oxford. She is a social and cultural historian of late medieval
and early modern England. Her first book, Socialising the Child in Late Medieval
England, explored morality and courtesy in late medieval socialising discourses for
young people. Additionally, she has written articles and chapters on the history of
book culture, religious history, the history of emotions, and law and emotions.
She is currently writing a book on the religious and social value of meekness from
the Middle Ages to the present.
Diana G. Barnes is a Lecturer at the University of New England, who has been
involved with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the
History of Emotions from its inception, as a Research Associate and an Associate
Investigator. Her book Epistolary Community in Print, 1580–1664 was published in
2013. In the history of emotions she has published on Brilliana Harley and Puritan
emotional ideals for marriage, Andrew Marvell’s stoic response to civil war, and
epistolary love in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor. She is currently researching
the relationship between gender and early-modern neostoicism in literature.
x Contributors
Susan Broomhall is Professor of History at The University of Western Australia,

whose research explores gender, emotions, science and technologies, knowledge
practices, material culture, cultural contact and the heritage of the early modern
world. She currently holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship,
researching the correspondence of Catherine de’ Medici.
Michael Champion is Deputy Director of the Institute for Religion and Critical
Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. He is the author of Explaining the
Cosmos: Creation and Cultural Interaction in Late Antiquity (2014) and co-editor with
Andrew Lynch of Understanding Emotions in Early Europe (2015) and with Juanita
Ruys and Kirk Essary of Before Emotion: The Language of Feeling, 400–1800 (2019).
Dolly MacKinnon, an Associate Professor in History at The University of

Queensland, analyses the mental, physical and auditory landscapes of people in the
past. Recent research includes ‘ “[D]id ringe at oure parish churche . . . for joye
that the Queene of Skotts was beheaded” ’, Performing Emotions in Early Europe
2018), and ‘‘Hearing madness and sounding cures” ’, Journal Politiques de la
communication (automne 2017).
Catherine Nall is senior lecturer in medieval literature at Royal Holloway,

University of London. She is author of Reading and War in fifteenth-century England:
from Lydgate to Malory, a new biography of Henry IV for the Penguin Monarchs
Series, and is currently working with Daniel Wakelin on a new edition of William
Worcester’s Boke of Noblesse.
Gordon D. Raeburn holds a PhD from the University of Durham, and from
2014–2017 was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Australian Research Council
funded Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, based at the University
of Melbourne. In 2018 he was the inaugural John Emmerson Research Fellow at
the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.
Dr Neil Ramsey is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of

New South Wales, Canberra. He works on the literary and culture responses to
warfare during the eighteenth century and Romantic eras, focusing on the
representations of personal experience and the development of a modern culture
of war. His first book, The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780-
1835, was published in 2011. His most recent, a collection co-edited with Gillian
Russell, Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture, was published
in 2015. He is currently completing a monograph on military writing of the
Romantic era, the research for which was funded by an Australian Research
Council Postdoctoral Fellowship that he held from 2010-2013.
Miranda Stanyon is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at King’s College

London, where her research focuses on Enlightenment and Romantic era writing
Contributors xi
in English and German, and on music and sound. Her work has appeared in edited
collections on emotions history and on early modern musicology, as well as in
German Quarterly, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Studies in Romanticism,
and Modern Philology.
Craig Taylor is a Reader in Medieval History at the University of York. He is

an intellectual and cultural historian who studies the politics and aristocracies of
fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France and England. He has published on the
Hundred Years War, chivalry, Joan of Arc, the Salic Law and propaganda, and is
currently collaborating with Jane Taylor and Rosalind Brown-Grant in the
translation of a series of fifteenth-century French chivalric biographies.
Robert White is Winthrop Professor in English and Cultural Studies at the

University of Western Australia and a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research
Council Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions 1100–1800. He has held
an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowship. His publications are
mainly in the field of early modern literature, especially Shakespeare, and also
Romantic literature. They include John Keats: A Literary Life (2010, revised,
paperback 2012); Pacifism in English Literature: Minstrels of Peace (2008); Natural
Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s (2005); and Natural Law in English
Renaissance Literature (1996), as well as articles on peace and literature. Most
recently he has published Avant-Garde Hamlet (2015), Shakespeare’s Cinema of Love
(2016), The New Fortune Theatre: That Vast Open Stage (co-ed. with Ciara Rawnsley)
and Ambivalent Macbeth (2018).
Taylor & Francis
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many of the essays in this collection take their origins from work conducted
within the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of
Emotions (CHE) (CE110001011). We are deeply grateful to CHE for its strong
support of various research projects and collaborations on emotions and war over
the years. Bob White, Neil Ramsey and the late Philippa Maddern encouraged
our efforts from the start. We thank the Centre’s national staff – Tanya Tuffrey,
Katrina Tap, Pam Bond and Erika Von Kaschke – along with Joanne McEwan,
Stephanie Tarbin and Ciara Rawnsley, for their expert help in organising and
promoting the academic events and visits through which we and the authors
developed the volume. Thanks are also due to colleagues at the Universities of
Melbourne and Western Australia, and in particular to Sue Broomhall, Jenny
Gregory, Susan Takao, Audrey Barton, the Institute of Advanced Studies at The
University of Western Australia, the UWA History Discipline, and the Perth
Medieval and Renaissance Group.
Natasha Hodgson, Laura Pilsworth, Catherine Aitken, Morwenna Scott and
Gabrielle Coakeley have kindly watched over the growth of Writing War at various
stages. Violet Hamence-Davies gave great assistance with copy editing the
submission. We also thank Alex Halliday at Florence Productions and Sara Barnes
for their careful work in preparing the final product.
Above all, we thank our authors for their patience, hard work, inspiration and
willingness to revise essays in response to comments from readers.
Taylor & Francis
1
‘IN FORM OF WAR’
War and emotional formation in
European history
Stephanie Downes and Andrew Lynch
I. ‘In form of war’

The phrase ‘arrayed in form of war’ is frequently found in late medieval English
official and legal documents to introduce descriptions of the ‘array’ – the armour,
weapons and organisation – of certain bands of male individuals (Paston 2004,
p. 78). As a written formula, ‘arrayed in form of war’ is both technical and
emotive, designed to place such men in maximum trouble with the law and to
brand them as socially intolerable. The phrase encapsulates a central theme of this
volume: that the emotions of war are ‘arrayed’ (that is, dressed and prepared) for
use through complex negotiations between the two historical ‘forms’ of war and
of writing. By reading form across both organised conflict and its textual
representation, our goal is to broaden understandings of the social conditioning of
human emotions in connection with war, throughout history. Feeling, too, takes
forms – shared vocabularies, attitudes and gestures – which have a powerful impact
on the way in which war in general, and individual wars in particular, garner
meaning. The essays assembled here consider all writing(s) relating to war as
‘genres’ available for analysis and interpretation, from poetry and biography to
tomb inscription. In placing the textual forms of war from various historical
periods side by side our object is to identify both how the ways of writing war’s
emotions have shifted over time and how they have sometimes stubbornly refused
change.
In covering a broad time-span, stretching from the fourteenth to the nineteenth
centuries, we are not looking to write an overarching historical narrative in
which uniform paradigm shifts in war’s emotional experience will be evident.
Rather, the chronological organisation of the volume highlights the varied
expressive challenges and opportunities presented by new modes and technologies
in both war and textual production. The volume asks: what are the variations,
new ventures and recurrences in the ‘emotional regimes’ of war that result from
2 Stephanie Downes and Andrew Lynch
these formal shifts? The essays it contains explore how different forms of writing
define war – whether as political violence, civilian suffering, or a theatre of
heroism or barbarism – giving war shape and meaning, often retrospectively.
War itself is a highly variable and historically contingent business. In insisting
on war as a set of changing historical, cultural and literary forms, we wish to escape
unitary and universalist notions of its emotional register – a sense of what war ‘feels
like’, either in general, or in any given place or time – while still honouring the
relation of its formal attributes to lived actualities of feeling. Such an approach
understands cultural concepts of emotions and their location within human identity
as deeply related to participation in textual culture. Monique Scheer has argued,
for example, that the formation of an ‘inner’ emotional life in German bourgeois
culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries achieved its definition largely
through the creation and consumption of written media: encyclopedias, diaries,
‘intense epistolary exchanges’, novels, and religious and philosophical discourse.
Stuart Sherman makes a similar case for English culture in the early modern period
(Sherman 1996). Scheer notes the decline of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ in German
definitions of emotion after 1840, but tracks a specific resurgence after the Second
World War of ‘interiority’ as the place of the ‘true self’, allowing ‘a refuge’ and ‘a
return to ‘inner values’ as a reaction to the experience of dictatorship and war. She
then goes on to chart the subsequent displacement of this view by behaviourist
models of the emotions that redirected attention to the physical body as the site
of ‘real’ emotional experience (Scheer 2014, pp. 35–39). For a while, historical
trauma produced a resurgence of the idea and value of emotional interiority, and
reframed the emotional life of a nation on an earlier model, which had developed
in written and sociable form in an earlier period.
Scheer’s study demonstrates that participation in written culture structures and
informs the performance of emotional repertoires, but always within particular
historical contexts. In this volume, and for this reason, we are especially attuned
to war’s emotions as historical experiences whose production is bound up in a
wide range of bodily and cultural practices – including the forms of writing
themselves. As Scheer elaborates in her discussion of how Bourdieu’s habitus relates
to the study of past emotions, bodily repertoires – including writing – are an
intrinsic part of emotion’s forms:
[t]he formulation of thought is different when one is moving a pen across

paper or typing on a keyboard as opposed to when one is speaking. Writing
for oneself, as in a diary, while sitting alone has interiorizing effects, whereas
speaking out loud while in view of a dialogic partner has exteriorizing ones.
The social relationship of the two speakers affects the bodily dimension of
the emotion in tone of voice, heart rate, and facial expression, which are all
guided by the practical sense of the habitus, somewhere between deliberate
control and unconscious habit.
(Scheer 2012, p. 212)
War and emotional formation 3
Aspects of this idea of the formal repertoires of emotion, ‘somewhere between

deliberate control and unconscious habit’, were adopted by Jan Plamper in his
study of Bolshevik children’s literature produced and consumed in times of war.
Plamper suggests that, in certain conditions, reading can affect an ‘emotional
socialization’ specifically related to war: ‘less intentional, less signified, and less
conscious aspects of the reading experience’, ‘get stored as practical knowledge
that is also simultaneously cognitive and corporeal’, and this ‘can be recalled . . .
in different circumstances, including those of warfare’ (Plamper 2014, p. 205).
Catherine Nall identifies a similar process but in an earlier period, arguing that for
the later medieval English ruling class, reading and the conduct of war were
inseparable activities. In her view, there is a dynamic, ‘circular’ interaction between
‘acts of textual production and reception, and the specific political and military
circumstances in which they occurred’ (Nall 2012, p. 2). Whether the process of
emotional formation described by Plamper and Nall occurs through reading in
general, or through reading about war in particular – whether it is understood as
conscious or unconscious, and whatever the theoretical balance struck between
the corporeal and cognitive elements of reading – both Plamper’s and Nall’s claims
avowedly depend, in their different ways, on a thoroughly situated and historicised
analysis of the texts and acts concerned.
Such historical analyses demand an awareness of the formal and aesthetic
communicative potential that texts offer their contemporary readerships, as well
as the evidence for readerly engagements with them. Writing War seeks to explore
that awareness with greater historical depth. Through its wide selection of sites of
utterance, written and theatrical genres, and contexts of publication and reception,
the collection elaborates the emotional forms of wars past, both in relation to the
nature of individual historical conflicts, and to the changing creative modes in
which they have been ‘arrayed’ and experienced since.
II. War, history and writing

As Kate McLoughlin points out in her introduction to the Cambridge Companion
to War Writing, war has been remembered in words so often throughout history
that even certain literary forms have become synonymous with individual conflicts;
the First World War’s affinity with English lyric, for example, or the close
connection of the ‘war on terror’ with the digital archive (McLoughlin 2009,
p. 1). Some of these generic textual associations have great historical depth: for
example, the Hundred Years’ War, waged by the English and French crowns
between 1337 and 1453, which is well remembered in its lyric forms and cross-
Channel literary exchanges (Butterfield 2009; Strakhov 2014; Bellis 2016). The
seventeenth-century civil wars in Britain take shape for us in a Georgic immersion
in landscape. Understandings of frontier colonial violence from the early modern
period are so often deflected through the literary-affective register of pastoralism.
Observing that certain conflicts possess a characteristic ‘poesis’ usually requires
a certain amount of distance – whether physical or temporal – from the conflict

itself (McLoughlin 2009, p. 2). Of course, war and writing can unfold simul-
taneously, but the backward glance of history becomes crucial in evaluating how
war, especially an individual war, will be culturally and socially remembered.
It is the trans-temporal potential of this poesis and its relationship to Western
representations of emotional experience in and after wartime that this collection
aims to explore in greater depth, with particular reference to England, France and
Scotland from the Middle Ages through to the earlier nineteenth century. A 2015
publication, Emotion, Politics and War, edited by Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory,
addresses its subject matter in a post-2001 setting, drawing on research by an
international selection of social and political scientists and cultural theorists to
emphasise the ways in which the study of emotion in warfare has been minimised
or overlooked. ‘Emotions,’ Neta C. Crawford (2015, p. xviii) insists in her Preface,
‘are constitutive of war and politics’. The volume pays close attention to the
emotional resonances of war’s past and present in the twenty-first century: it opens
with a reflection on the emotional meanings demonstrated in the First World War
commemorations of 2014 (Gregory & Åhäll 2015, p. 1); while an early chapter
by Brian Massumi (2015, p. 17), reprinted from a 2013 multimedia project on
‘Histories of Violence’, looks back to 11 September 2001, to ask of the political,
social and affective present, ‘What remains of that day?’1 Together, the volume’s
contributors consider the roles that various texts play in preserving the emotions
of war, from letters and memoirs at the beginning of the previous century, to
emails and online media, demonstrating the centrality of writing to war’s emotions,
even in the digital age. The collection’s primary emphasis, however, remains on
the emotional and literal politics of modern warfare and the various ways in which
these are rendered intelligible in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Gregory
& Åhäll 2015, p. 3).
Our volume seeks to understand and articulate this contingency of war, textual
media and feeling over a much longer history. The following sections of the
introduction focus on how works of literature from various historical periods are
shaped by and in response to wars past, and how these literary-affective forms
attempt to shape contemporary and future narratives of war. Our project is in no
way constrained by this archive; here we seek to use the rich and varied example
of literature in order to examine the role of writing and reading about war in war’s
long affective past. In the category of ‘literature’ we recognise the wide variety of
poetic, narrative, theatrical and social forms which war has and might assume
through writing which demonstrates some awareness or self-consciousness of its
own formal vocabulary and structures, and through the associated range of emotions
which it might be said to express or provoke. Such texts offer rich case studies for
the expression and interpretation of war’s emotions; but also case studies for war-
writing in general. Is there an emotional or literary genre of war to be traced from
the medieval period through the nineteenth century in the Western European
tradition? What can we learn from literature about the history of the emotions
of war?
III. War literature as emotional tradition

In medieval European literature, war was a central theme, closely linked with
genres such as romance and epic. From Troy to Jerusalem, the locations of past
wars and the emotions they produced and that had produced them were vividly
imaged. Writers often adapted classical narrative traditions as commentary on
current conditions of national and civil conflict, from the Crusades to the Hundred
Years War and the Wars of the Roses. Medieval literature absorbed the culture of
warfare, and metaphors drawn from the experience of war sustain some of the
most famous and popular literary texts of the day, such as the siege of the captured
and imprisoned ‘Rose’ in the thirteenth-century bestseller, the Roman de la rose.
Perhaps more surprisingly, medieval literature also directly influenced the way
wars were fought: during the fifteenth century, the revival of practical interest in
Vegetius’s late fourth-century treatise on the art and conduct of war, De re militari,
meant that versions and adaptations were widely available in the vernacular and
newly influential in these forms (Saunders 2009, pp. 84–85). Military manuals
crossed temporal, geographical, linguistic and even political boundaries with ease.
Christine de Pizan’s Livre des faits d'armes et de chevalerie (1410), which drew directly
on Vegetius’s text, was extremely popular in England throughout the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, while Catalan writer Raymond Lull’s popular thirteenth-
century text, Libre qui es de l’ordre de cavalleria (The Book of the Order of Chivalry),
reached a wide readership in France throughout the later medieval period. Both
works were translated into English and printed by William Caxton, England’s ‘first
printer’, in the late fifteenth century. Many of these vernacular manuals had an
extraordinary longevity, influencing not only the reality of war, but the production
of literature exploring its effects. Shakespeare, for example, is reported to have
drawn from such works in his representation of just war in Henry V (Pugliatti
2010), while in the late fourteenth century, the poet John Gower called London
‘newe Troye’, reflecting the contemporary fascination with classical narratives of
war, conflict and civic destruction.
In other famous literary texts from the medieval and early modern periods, war
was thematised at the same time as it was curiously absent from the text, or con-
sciously fictionalised into meta-narratives of war. In a famous scene from Chaucer’s
great love poem, Troilus and Criseyde (set during the Trojan war but with little
reference to the conflict itself), Criseyde reads aloud from the story of the ‘Siege
of Thebes’ with two of her ladies (Book 2, ll. 83–84).2 Reading about war in times
of war forms another kind of redaction of war into words: the words of one war
are transposed onto the experience of another, shaping its experience and represen-
tation anew. Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene more subtly recalls classical
models of warfare and warriors in its representation of Elizabethan political rule
and expansion. The later books of Spenser’s allegory (which includes moments of
startlingly graphic violence throughout), offers readers a metaphorical reflection
on Elizabeth’s colonisation of Ireland (Fogarty 1989; Lim 1995). In Cervantes’
roughly contemporaneous satirical novel, Don Quixote, the windmill-tilting
protagonist draws on medieval chivalric rather than classical models in telling his
own tales of war. Cervantes himself had first-hand experience of conflict as a
soldier, having fought under Philip II in the Battle of Lepanto and various Spanish
conflicts against the Turks. ‘None in his poverty is as poor as he,’ Don Quixote
declares, ‘for he depends on his miserable pay which comes late or never or on
whatever he can steal with his own hands at great risk to life and conscience’
(Cervantes 2005, p. 331). Don Quixote speaks here in the voice of a soldier, but
his words recall the supplications of medieval poets to their patrons, suggesting the
entanglement of literary form and soldiers’ experience. Writing during the Dutch
War of Independence (1568–1648), Cervantes glosses the use and abuse of earlier
literatures in the representation of contemporary forms of violence.
Articulations of suffering in war literature have a distressingly marked longevity.
In the introduction to his translation of Beowulf, the late Seamus Heaney recites a
fragment from the poem of a scene of a Geat woman keening over the funeral
pyre of her slain lord. This he describes as ‘at once immemorial and oddly
contemporary’:
A Geat woman too sang out in grief;

with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.
(ll. 3150–3155)
For Heaney (1999, p. xxiv), writing in 1999, the text’s depiction of the woman’s
grief ‘could come straight from a late twentieth-century news report, from Rwanda
or Kosovo’. Her grief is expressed as a ‘litany’, in Old English a ‘song sorg-cearig’
(sorrowful song), terms which translate her cries of anguish into a form of oral
poetry. Heaney captures a tautology typical of both modern and medieval efforts
to articulate the experience and expression of trauma in words: poetry gives the
subject space to ‘unburden . . . herself’, while simultaneously containing her cries
and reducing them to a script and familiar textual performance.
IV. ‘If poetry could truly tell it backwards’

If Heaney is right here that poetry asserts a continuity in the emotional experience
of war across such different times, places and cultures, then a question arises: does
poetry ‘tell the truth’ about wars, or does it shape later responses to them according
to its own separate courses? ‘The Last Post’, written by Carol Ann Duffy to
commemorate the centenary of the First World War in 2014, opens with the line:
‘If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin . . .’ (Duffy 2014, p. 112). Duffy’s
conditional ‘if’ raises directly this issue of the reliability of the poetic war narrative.
What, exactly, is poetry capable of expressing about war, or an experience of war?
Implicit in Duffy’s provisional opening is the failure of form to represent war, or

to capture an experience of war. The poem concludes: ‘If poetry could truly tell
it backwards, / then it would’, underscoring its regenerative fiction and fragility.
What the speaker of the poem implies in the lines in between is that even if it
can’t, it can still try, and that there is a value – even valour – in poetry’s efforts
to memorialise. The poem emphasises the importance of the act of writing about
war by imagining the writer herself as a war hero, able to unearth the dead
‘from History’ by conjuring with words ‘all those thousands dead / . . . shaking
dried mud from their hair / and queuing up for home, freshly alive’ (Duffy 2014,
p. 113). In every attempt to narrate war, Duffy suggests, lies the potential for
renewal after war: the chance to review, revise and reform the narrative of war’s
(or wars’) past, for the better, in the present. Contemporary poetry about war, like
Duffy’s ‘Last Post’, very frequently turns on the speaker’s discomfort with language’s
ability to represent the reality of war with an accuracy or intensity adequate to the
experience. The process of translating war into words wields the worrying potential
for distortion, manipulation and misrepresentation. War writing from Homer
onwards acknowledges its inadequacy in this way, making good use of the
‘inexpressibility topos’ (Curtius 1952, pp. 159–162): – ‘But how can I picture it
all? It would take a god to tell the tale’ (Homer The Iliad, Book 12, p. 225).
Equally, the Chorus to Henry V asks ‘can this cockpit hold / The vasty fields of
France?’ (Henry V, Prologue). In such ways, literature may be said not so much
to compromise war’s truth as to warn audiences that they can never read or hear
it straight.
The question of how poetry and other textual accounts remember war, and how
they consciously form and reform the past in the present, is central to this volume:
in past centuries, as today, the ability and even the very value of using language to
represent war was often called into question. Certain English ‘clerkly’ writers of the
medieval period, including Chaucer, the Gawain-poet and Hoccleve, rather
pointedly avoid the detailed description of war or fighting: they argue that their
particular ‘matere’ is otherwise (Troilus, Book V, ll. 1765–1761); that they don’t
have time and it would be too much trouble, even boring (Sir Gawain, ll. 713–725);
or that through their ‘unkonnynge’ they could not do justice to the subject
(Hoccleve ‘The Dialogue’, ll. 582–588). Overall, this looks like a form of resistance
to writing fight descriptions, that as poets they have better things for readers to
invest their emotions in. When Chaucer provides a rare detailed fighting scene, as
in the Knight’s Tale, the outcome of the whole affair is eventually reduced to an
‘aventure [accident]’; a further event, described as both ‘miracle’ and ‘aventure’,
reverses the main outcome anyway (ll. 2569–2662). The language of bodily trauma
– ‘clothered blood’; ‘venym and corrupcioun’ – and its treatments – ‘vomit upward’
and ‘downward laxatif’ (ll. 2745–2756) – here intrudes viscerally on chivalric
glamour. The overall effect inhibits any straightforward emotional engagement on
the part of the reader with the story of victory or defeat in arms. In this respect, for
all the abstract references to chivalry and the intense detail of its cultural practices,
the Knight’s Tale seems formed to make it difficult to ‘know what to feel’ about
fighting, by complicating or even disabling some expected emotional attachments

to the genres that mediate it in Chaucer’s time.
The best part of four centuries later, Tristram Shandy instances another way in
which literature problematises the emotions of war. Uncle Toby’s ‘Apologetical
Oration’ on war asks: ‘If, when I was a school-boy, I could not hear a drum beat,
but my heart beat with it – was it my fault? Did I plant the propensity there? –
Did I sound the alarm within, or Nature?’ (Sterne Tristram Shandy, p. 442).3 Toby,
a sympathetic and otherwise gentle character, claims that his ‘propensity’ to war
is human nature. Yet his Apology reveals a childhood nurture saturated in the Iliad
and in chapbook versions of medieval and Elizabethan military romances:
When Guy, Earl of Warwick, and Parismus and Parismenus, and Valentine
and Orson, and the Seven Champions of England, were handed around the
school, – were they not all purchased with my own pocket-money?
(Sterne Tristram Shandy, p. 442)
Toby acknowledges the influence, arguing that his schoolboy capacity to weep for
Hector and feel for Priam’s grief – ‘you know, brother, I could not eat my dinner’
– clears him of a mere selfish lust for war. He says nothing else of his extra-curricular
childhood patronage of romances, but one must speculate that the extreme partiality
of their outlook lies behind his assessment of war as only ‘the getting together of
quiet and harmless people, with their swords in their hands, to keep the ambitious
and the turbulent within bounds’ (Sterne Tristram Shandy, p. 444). Overall, reading
seems to have given Toby (and possibly his school friends) the ‘propensity’ to see
war as a matter of innate honour and morality, while containing the consciousness
of its evils within a culture of educated literacy – Homeric pathos. Sterne may be
comically deploying literature here to critique and control some of its potentially
harmful social tendencies, for both high and low reading audiences.
A more complex situation, in which writing about war essentially distrusts
itself, occurs when the emotions aroused by war are found to be too strong for
words. Sarah Cole describes ‘the inexpressibility of war experience’ as ‘a primary
creed’ of Great War writing, ‘from rough diary notes to canonical poetry’. Might
this be considered a form of war in and of itself? A shared belief in the ‘extreme
and ubiquitous failure of language’ to speak feeling seems intrinsic to the deep
affective relationships formed between male combatants. The peculiar intensity of
feelings between serving soldiers has perhaps always created a further challenge to
their expression in writing. As Cole suggests, in ‘the case of personal relations, the
problem of inadequate language is registered by a sense that it is impossible to
translate into civilian terms the richness and precariousness of these new ties’ (Cole
2003, p. 143). In a grimmer version of Uncle Toby’s mysterious ‘wound’ that
isolates him from normal civilian life, literature of the ‘male friend’ in war, Cole
argues, shows him as eventually ‘destroyed by a profound detachment from
sustainable institutions, palpably lacking a cultural vocabulary that can be shared
with the non-war world’ (Cole 2003, p. 184). Septimus in Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs Dalloway is another such figure. Throughout the period covered by the essays
in this volume, war literature suggests that the truth of war feelings cannot be told,
but still requires us – as Woolf does – to be emotionally confronted by their
human effects.
V. War writing and emotional subjectivities

Holly Crocker (2017, p. 88) has recently distinguished between approaches to the
study of medieval emotions that ‘treat . . . identity categories as already known’ and
those with a ‘focus . . . not on specific feelings per se, but on what feelings – from
emotions to affects – can do in the process of fashioning medieval subjectivities’.
Crocker (2017, p. 94, n. 2) speaks of medieval ‘affects’ as ‘the powers which are
connected to the intellectual powers of reason and the will, and which are central
to orienting subjects toward abstract categories that organise identity in ethical
terms’. She notes, nevertheless, that while affects were supposed to rule the operations
of the lower ‘sensitive’ soul, that process could be impaired or even reversed by
strong emotions: ‘Quite literally, the (e)motions of the sensitive soul affected the
intellectual soul’ (Crocker 2017, p. 84). In tracing these processes, Crocker (2017,
pp. 91–92) goes on to argue, the study of ‘literary representations’ is ‘crucial’
because ‘literary texts show what emotions did . . . Literatures demonstrate how
identities might be changed; they fashion new affective affiliations, and they unmake
old somatic alliances’. Crocker is speaking of medieval literature, but her statement
applies more generally to literature (broadly interpreted) as a site for studying the
history of emotions.
Crocker’s appeal to medieval affect theory is perhaps especially relevant to the
demonstrative capacities of war literature, where ‘higher’ motivations of reason,
practicality and ethical alignment are mooted, but also all manner of passions are
shown to be unleashed by and on the ‘sensitive soul’. Her approach finds an echo
in modern historical research, such as Joanna Bourke’s study of fear in soldiers
during the two world wars. Bourke (2001, p. 330) concludes that, for all the
military’s attempts to forge a ‘man-machine’,
[the] murderous strength and rigidity of the machine was effortlessly subverted
by the fluidity of the emotions: fear and anger, exhilaration and resignation
– these were the stuff of the individual at war.
As Bourke shows, nothing could eradicate the cognitive and bodily effects of fear
in humans. Not only were these manifested in very varied and unpredictable ways,
but recognition of fear’s continuing presence inspired a wide range of management
strategies: it was variously proposed that soldiers should be punished for succumbing
to fear, trained to deny it, told that it was normal and to ‘live with it’, or led to
channel fear into ‘positive’ activities. The ‘higher’ desire of military commanders
was for consistency and predictability in defining and containing combat emotions,
but the written archive provides a set of narratives of differing behaviours, which
makes the contingent and uncertain – ‘fluid’ – nature of the ‘sensitive’ emotion
clear, both in the lived experience of the soldiers and in the baffled discursive
responses of those observing them.
Writing about war is always, to some degree, a contest of this kind between form
and formlessness, to which a host of ideological, generic and poetic strategies
contribute their different emphases, and in which writers and readers easily find
themselves emotionally confused. Patricia Di Marco (2000, pp. 29–30), commenting
on the fourteenth-century poem Les Voeux du Heron, writes that in medieval
chivalric narratives, ‘deeds of arms lack any intrinsic ethical coding’, while ‘laments
over the horror of war often coexist comfortably with strident defences of the
necessity and righteousness of war’.4 Towards the other end of the literary spectrum,
in ‘mirror for princes’ literature, some modern readers understand a medieval clerk’s
anti-war advice to a ruler (Henry V) as a genuine moral intervention (Perkins 2001),
while others see it as self-ingratiating window-dressing, designed to justify the king’s
ambitions while making him look properly reluctant to fight (Pearsall 1994, p. 389).
There can be no simple readerly alignment of literary genre with war ideology, just
as there was no simple response to war or the warrior in medieval society. Sir John
Hawkwood, a famous mercenary adventurer in Italy, could be scorned as a pestilent
‘robber’, yet also given a noble tomb in the cathedral of Florence and later held up
as a model of knighthood by William Caxton (Keen 1976, p. 32).
Similarly, in Shakespeare’s Henry V, the spectator is exposed to every rhetorical
strategy concerning war, from rousing nationalist enthusiasm – ‘Once more unto
the breach, dear friends’ (Act 3, Scene 1) and ‘St Crispin’s Day!’ (Act 4, Scene 3)
– through the cynicism of Nym and Bardolph, and to ruminations on the king’s
moral responsibility for casualties. The king denies his hand in soldiers’ bad deaths
in the war he is waging, on the grounds that ‘[e]very subject’s duty is the king’s;
but every subject’s soul is his own’. Yet it is often pointed out that in answering
this charge he dodges the broader question of whether the war itself is ‘just’
(Pugliatti 2010, pp. 217–218; Lake 2016, pp. 368–369). Blame for the war, in his
version, falls solely on the French. But many think the play reveals from the outset
‘Henry’s underlying wish to conquer France for his own good’ (Quabeck 2013,
p. 158), and read ‘his public justifications for the invasion . . . [as] Machiavellian
fraud’ (Mebane 2010, p. 258), or, rather more positively, as part of ‘a series of
political effects’ worked by Henry’s ‘manipulation’ of ‘rhetoric’ (Lake 2016,
p. 363). That modern readers are able to see the play in these multiple lights is in
part due to its polyvocality. Very unlike medieval chivalric texts, Shakespeare’s
play form allows representatives of common soldiers to speak for themselves as a
means of bringing the official view into question. War’s existence as an emotional
entity is revealed to depend greatly on who is allowed to ‘speak’ of it, which is to
say, who is given power over its language, and acknowledged as holding a
legitimate interest in its practices and effects. This capacity to speak the cultural
vocabulary of war is directly linked to the new possibilities made available in genre
and poetic form.
One result of exposure to such a variety of war writing, and of responses to it,
over the long course of time is a keen awareness of war as a hyper-mediated
‘matter’, which both arouses deeply emotional responses and renders them suspect.
War’s traditional status as a ‘bottom line’ proof of nobility, courage, masculinity
and loyalty – of who ‘does well’, as romances and treatises on knighthood say –
simultaneously sets up its liability as a cultural ‘field’ to exploitation by vested
interests. Maurice Keen (1976, p. 34) notes, with reference to the late medieval
period, that ‘one reason for the failure of this age to keep the social problem of
war within bounds lay, ironically, in the idealism of its attitude to war and the
soldier, in what we may call the ethic of chivalry’. Those who could claim that
their war was ‘just’ in their own eyes could represent it as a noble, even holy,
activity. In this ‘chivalric’ view, warfare became an honourable, even a religious,
undertaking because of the dangers and hardships that war itself created for
combatants (Kaeuper 2009, pp. 94–115). At the same time ‘because of . . .
[chivalry’s] underlying religious and idealistic justification, it made it difficult for
men to look squarely at the parasitic activities of soldiers and to recognise them
for what they were’ (Keen 1976, pp. 34, 44–45).
VI. Sacred emotions of war

Religious reference is a common emotional and rhetorical vocabulary within
modern war memorialisation, crossing and complicating a simultaneous view of
war as human disaster, and providing another powerful example of the unstable
semiotics of much war writing. Inscriptions on the Menin Gate Memorial in
Ypres begin ‘In Maiorem Dei Gloriam’ (‘To the Greater Glory of God’), and a
scriptural text, chosen by Rudyard Kipling, is incorporated: ‘Their name liveth
for evermore’ (Ecclesiasticus 44:14). The choice of text is misleading. The full
verse is: ‘Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore’,
but the Gate commemorates 54,389 soldiers whose bodies could never be found
for burial. War monuments from Britain to Burma to Australia carry the same
words, adopting a sacralising vocabulary that both marks and obscures its own
provenance. Confessional and ethnic communities have also used religious occasion
and symbolism to claim a distinct place for their own war dead in honourable
memory, and to assert their loyal contribution (Tierney 2017; Daley 2016).
Through means like these, admiration for the courage of soldiers – and the wish
to honour their sufferings – can be readily transferred to ideas of war itself as a
moral, even a sacred, enterprise. Such slippage can confer a glorious ‘name’ on its
fighters, while the names of non-combatant casualties and the bereaved remain
unrecorded.
The process of sacralisation occurs more readily when literature and other
cultural products maintain a focus on the ‘deeds’ of combatants and the defined
‘field’ of battle, especially in texts that ground their representation of warfare in
traditional discourses of honour, loyal fellowship, courage, suffering and sacrifice.

War experience has often been taken as both the classical and religious test of
higher human qualities. Aristotle’s long influence helped maintain the notion that
facing death in war offered ‘the finest conditions’ for showing bravery because
‘such deaths . . . occur in the greatest and finest danger’ (Aristotle Nichomachean
Ethics, Book 3, Chapter 6:8).5 The Crusades buttressed this classical vocabulary
with Christian piety and sacrifice. In modern times too, war has been treated as
both a theatre of magnanimity and an unrivalled emotional education. These
attitudes connect human experience across history, but also distinguish combatants
in every epoch. For Oliver Wendell Holmes, speaking in 1884, the American
Civil War:
embodie[d] . . . in the most impressive form our belief that to act with
enthusiasm and faith is the condition of acting greatly. . . . [T]he generation
that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our
great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was
given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
(in Posner 1992)6
Holmes’ words were used to preface the opening episode of Ken Burns’ 1990
television documentary, The Civil War, which reached 40,000,000 viewers at its
first showing and is widely used in US schools.7 While the quotation does not
speak for the mood of the entire series, or of Holmes’ whole speech, its special
prominence captures the lasting resilience of positive emotional attachments to
war experience, even – or especially – in a recent ‘liberal’ American context.
Feeling begets feeling, and great feeling begets great feeling. . . . the tattered
flags of our regiments gathered in the Statehouses, are worth more to our
young men by way of chastening and inspiration than the monuments of
another hundred years of peaceful life could be.
(in Posner 1992)8
Through such writing and its elevation of the tattered flag over a hundred years’
life, war is granted a special emotional status – ‘set apart’ – that ranks it above
peacetime in official cultural memories, and lends it moral authority.
It is no exaggeration to say that in its vocabulary of ‘passion’ and ‘feeling’
Holmes’ speech presents the war as a fortunate and beneficial event. To treat the
Civil War as he does depends on accepting a soldier’s presence in it as primarily
responsive to an emotional demand made primarily by ‘life’, although one clearly
inflected by class and gender: ‘as life is action and passion, it is required of a man
that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not
to have lived’ (in Posner 1992).9 This approach to war through emotional
attachment to a ‘cause’ lifts it to a level of abstraction, where each side legitimately
holds its separate ‘sacred convictions’ yet is respectfully bonded in feeling with the
enemy. Then, when battle is entered, individual agency is still further eclipsed,
and ‘[t]he rest belongs to fate’. In effect, Holmes sets up in emotional terms the
familiar conditions of a medieval chivalric literary ‘field’, where other motivations
and effects are subordinated to the display of virtue and killing occurs without
guilt: ‘I slew him knightly’ is a common self-exoneration in the world of Le Morte
Darthur. As if in a medieval romance or chronicle, the combatants Holmes
memorialises and addresses are clearly ‘gentles’ – ‘gallant and distinguished officers’,
his ‘friends’, those with whom he mixes ‘at the regimental dinner’. It is no surprise
when he states that they displayed in war the ‘high breeding’ and ‘romantic
chivalry’ of the ‘ancien régime’. One is reminded of the herald’s casualty list in
Shakespeare's Henry V, distinguishing those ‘of name’ from the ‘rest’ (Act 4, Scene
8). Of course, the practical, social and conceptual conditions of fighting the
American Civil War differed hugely from those that operated in the much earlier
wars described in this volume. It has become a cliché to say that the Civil War,
with its industrial military technology – the Gatling Gun and the ironclad battleship
– is ‘the first modern war’ (Phillips 2006). Yet for all those differences, Holmes’
literary treatment largely erases that traditional periodisation in a long-familiar
emotional register of war.
The point of such a comparison is in no way to suggest that all wars are the
same, but to show that certain cultural forms of writing war are extraordinarily
long-lived and resistant to other changes, or at least that they can operate long
after most or all of the original circumstances in which they were first fashioned
have disappeared. Holmes’ outlook possibly harks back to Walter Scott’s Essay on
Chivalry (1834, p. 107), with its celebration of the ‘constant and honourable
opposition, unembittered by rancour or personal hatred’ displayed in ‘chivalry’s
‘most brilliant period . . . during the wars between France and England’. One
difference is, however, that Scott believed these great days had ended in the
internecine conflicts of the fifteenth century, ‘utterly inconsistent with the courtesy,
fair play, and gentleness, proper to chivalry’ (Scott 1834, p. 111) and he sharply
distinguished between private modern instances of honourable conduct between
enemies and the general carnage of war, especially civil war (Scott 1814, p. civ).
For Holmes, chivalry, as an emotional opportunity in war, simply survives all
other contingencies unscathed. If literary and cultural forms and symbols of war
have a much longer life than its technologies, it seems that their longevity might
be largely due to the continued provision of these forms and symbols as ‘emotives’
of war – that is, as performative means or ‘inputs’ to the self, by which particular
emotional alignments towards war can be aroused and sustained (Reddy 2001,
p. 322). The forms of emotional alignment constituted by literary vocabularies and
cultural signs continue to make their presence felt even when they seem very
distant from practical realities. To be in wartime, to remember it, or to read about
it, means to some extent experiencing it through prevailing genres and vocabularies
of representation, however that experience may jar with other emotional prompts.
VII. War genres, emotion and historical periodicity

Over the 600-year time-span covered by essays in this volume the precociousness,
persistence and unpredictable re-emergence of emotional forms of war cast doubt
on some modern versions of periodisation in Western emotions history. These
include those that argue for an increasing restraint on emotional behaviours
through a ‘civilising process’ as the West progressed into ‘modernity’, and those
that relate an account of new developments in emotional life to changes in
political, religious, familial and socio-economic arrangements. To these views, the
careful examination of medieval and early-modern written evidence has come as
a check, for example in considering the long history of grief in family bereavement,
or conjugal affections. For all that empirical resistance to notions of emotional
periodisation, it is still reasserted that ‘[t]he findings about modern change do tie
together around a shared link to modernity; they are not random historical
accidents’ (Stearns 2014, p. 30). In this argument, when major historical changes
are seen to establish ‘modernity’ as a unifying experiential paradigm, it can be easy
to overlook the multiple and overlapping mediation of emotions through literary
form, and the complex, temporally indeterminate, and often adversarial relationships
that literature maintains with the societies and cultures within which it is produced
and received. For ‘modern’ readers about war in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, for example, the age of capitalism, consumerism and Romanticism was
simultaneously an age when Shakespeare and The Pilgrim’s Progress found very
wide audiences. There is never only one way of writing or reading – or even
experiencing – war available to a given society. Therefore there can never be only
one emotional response to be made to it, nor one fully consistent emotional
temporality.
Rather than seeing war emotions as restricted to particular temporal periods on
the grounds of widespread historical changes, we might instead see these emotions
as potentiated by different and changing forms and genres of representation and
apprehension. We can recognise these as operating more independently of time
and place, while remaining conscious that genre and form are themselves subject
to wider historical changes. As in Barbara Rosenwein’s conception of ‘emotional
communities’ as multi-centred and overlapping circles, we might appreciate
war’s potential for emotional subjectivity in any period as variously shared by
and divided between literary and cultural forms and genres. And again, as in
Rosenwein’s (2009, p. 2) model, it becomes possible then to envisage individuals
and groups as members of different formal and generic communities at the same
time. In fact, given that there is nearly always some generic and formal choice to
hand, it is perhaps harder to see how people might stay members of only one such
community, rather than imagining and speaking within multiple registers at once.
It might then be argued that the abundance of continuing, vestigial, new and
rapidly modifying genres in the last few centuries – set in contrast to the rather
smaller array widely available, and perhaps more closely controlled, in earlier
periods – may be a good part of what ‘modernity’ means in the context of war:
modernity as emotional polyphony in war writing. Yet prescriptive and linear

periodisations of emotional subjectivity are, as Caroline Dinshaw suggests, always
reductive, both of ‘the times that are operant in the literature of the Middle Ages
as well as the expansive now that can result from engagement with that literature’
(Dinshaw 2012, p. xv). The varied generic and formal models of emotional being
available to readers and audiences in any period work to reveal it as ‘temporally
heterogenous’ (Dinshaw 2102, p. xiv), rather than as an ‘age’. Chaucer’s emotionally
indeterminate image of war in the Knight’s Tale, discussed above, is renewed in
Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme (1839). Stendahl’s radically oblique, decentred
and emotively unstable account of Waterloo, part-farcical and part-anguished, was
published shortly before the grand state funeral for Napoleon I, whose victories
would subsequently be glorified in the imperial splendour of Les Invalides.
Stendhal’s own life-long conflicted response to Napoleon is well known
(Richardson 1973, pp. 3–7). As viewed through the eyes of his naïve hero Fabrizio,
the Waterloo scene refuses to respect any fixed emotional decorum, challenging
the reader by not foreclosing on any of a multiplicity of impressions: pragmatism;
horror; kindness; fear; absurdity; despair; and unlikely grandeur.
“Give me four of your men,” he said to the corporal in a faint voice, “I’ve
got to be carried to the ambulance; my leg is shattered.” “Go and f–––
yourself!” replied the corporal, “you and all your generals. You’ve all of you
betrayed the Emperor to-day.”
(Stendhal 1926, pp. 66–67)
New possibilities of emotional subjectivity are given scope, and former versions
are troubled, when such a change in literary form takes the imaginary of war
beyond former conceptual and expressive practices, even without leaving the
literal war zone. Stendhal creates a war that is intensely visual, yet cannot be ‘seen’:
a poetic medium in which the vast and creaking economy of the military and its
hangers-on – the messy logistics of armies – signally fails to create a comprehensive
‘field’, but potentiates a collision of emotional styles and outcomes.
Like our earlier publication, Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature
(2015), the present volume’s concentration on the written forms of war is
transhistorical, transnational (in the context of those historical periods in which
the modern ‘nation’ can be said to exist), and cross-genre. The essays assembled
here pay close attention to the ways in which writings in various genres or written
forms of war – including poetry, chronicle, autobiography, romance, epic, theatre,
treatise, letter, lyric, inscription and journal – have, in turn, helped form war as
an emotional experience in Western literary tradition. Our contributors trace
continuities and changes in the emotional register of violent conflict as it has been
mediated and transmitted to modernity in the written record of the European past.
The essays analyse the emotions of war from various viewpoints: representations
of the experience of combatants, civilians and spectators; textual, literary and
theatrical productions which adapt war themes for particular emotional effects;
studies of generic, historiographical and performance traditions of the emotions

involved in war by reflecting on the historical, theoretical and thematic frameworks
in which war writing is emotionally constructed. And they cover some of the most
significant conflicts in Western European history, beginning with the Hundred
Years War, and including the French Wars of Religion, the English Civil War
and the Battle of Waterloo. Some contributors probe the fictionalisation of war’s
past as commentary on the experience of contemporary conflict; while others
explore the dramatisation and textual formation of immediate solider and civilian
experiences. The final essay considers a view from the mid-nineteenth century,
looking back at the long history of European thought on the subject of war,
shortly before the introduction of industrialised mass warfare radically changed
apprehensions of its emotional and ethical texture.
As in this introduction, several of the contributors to this volume focus on how
literary texts formalise the representation of war. Andrew Lynch explores the
‘close relation of “violence” to emotion’ in the medieval and early modern periods
in a variety of fourteenth-century English fictions. Concentrating on two texts in
particular – the Alliterative Morte Arthure and the Siege of Jerusalem – Lynch shows
how form (verse) and style (alliteration) simultaneously contain and unleash a vast
array of acts of ‘violence’ (which we might best understand in the modern sense
of ‘violation’) in the context of warfare. Catherine Nall looks to a combination of
literary and chronicle works in her discussion of what she identifies as the
demonstration of ‘violent compassion’ in a variety of late medieval genres, including
romance and mirrors for princes, as well as military treatises. The idea of compassion
itself might be expressed and inflected in Middle English in a number of ways,
from ‘pite’ to ‘misericorde’. And yet, far from being used solely to curtail violence
in these texts, compassion, as Nall shows, is often ‘an emotion that acts as a
precursor to vengeance’. Both the experience and expression of compassion, she
demonstrates, form ‘a crucial part of the affective foundation of the practice of
violence’ in an array of late medieval war narratives.
Concentrating on the political representation of war during the Anglo-French
conflicts of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Craig Taylor and Tracy
Adams treat a variety of genres, from the ‘chivalric’ biography to chronicle and
lyric. These are all courtly forms of writing about war, and yet they form the
emotions of war in very different ways. Taylor identifies a marked tendency
among Francophone biographers to relegate the emotional experience of war to
the backgrounds of their accounts. The exception to this rule is anger, which –
in this medieval biographical register at least – consistently motivates the subject
to righteous action, in a manner analogous to the role of pity in roughly
contemporaneous English works discussed by Nall. In the conflicts of the Orléanist
and Burgundian factions during the early fifteenth century, anger was similarly an
essential ingredient in violent conflict. Adams examines the Burgundian ‘Cour
amoureuse’ – a festival of love-poetry – as a ‘theatre for defining relationships and
enacting the emotional injuries that motivated its leaders to take up arms’ [against
the Orléanists]. Here, anger is a highly social emotion, and displays of anger that
were formal (aristocratic) contrasted with those that were frenzied (popular).
Although different types of anger were being mobilised with respect to the same
situation of escalating political tension, as Adams shows, both were instrumental
in bringing about armed conflict.
In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the English playwright Thomas
Dekker drew on the currency of pamphlets treating news of war on the Continent
in his work for both the popular media and the theatre. Merridee L. Bailey
observes how Dekker’s commercial interest in war narratives contributed actively
to the making of ‘a culture of war writing in the early modern period’. Dekker
has long been of interest to scholars of both literature and history for the ways in
which his works offer a window on the development of the theatre and the
printing press in late Elizabethan and Jacobean civic life; in her chapter, Bailey
reveals how the diversity of Dekker’s references to war across his professional
writings demonstrates particular attention to its emotional as well as economic
effects. In whichever forum he was writing, Dekker deploys a range of linguistic
devices and images to ‘humanise’ the impact of war on ordinary citizens, seeking
to educate as well as entertain by ‘giving voice to complex and contested views
about war’s value and cost’.
In the form of battle, war may look like a simple clash of angry opposites. In
writing, we see better how it excites mixed emotional attachments and reactions.
Gordon Raeburn explores how the battle of Newburn (1640) gave focus to
complex expository strategies, in which the Scots victors stressed their reluctance
to take up arms, and the defeated English tried to cast off shame by painting the
invaders as both violently aggressive and fearful. Accusations of cowardice flew
back and forth. Yet there was a broader view, more independent of partisan
interests, in which the perceived actions of both sides – one wrongfully attacking,
one too weakly defending – caused emotional pain to a much later commentator.
Robert White, discussing poetry in the aftermath of Waterloo (1815), shows that
British writers visiting the battlefield sometimes struggled to work the blank
impact of mass slaughter into traditional forms of victory. In 1816 Wordsworth
found the event laden with ‘glory’ and ‘triumph’, but when he and his sister visited
the site in 1820, ‘glory seemed betrayal’ of the ‘vast hoards of hidden carnage
near’. Southey and Scott give similar witness to the emotional change made when
the ‘field’ of victory ‘reveals as much human degradation of nature as of human-
kind’.
Dolly Mackinnon examines war’s emotions over a much longer aftermath. Her
essay reveals the ‘continuing emotional community’ built around memorials to
Lowland Scots killed for upholding the national Covenant. Through renewed
material practices, this community becomes both linked to and constitutive of
‘emotional landscapes’. Encompassing monuments and graves, and examining both
printed and oral accounts, Mackinnon shows that a wide network of witness across
place and time empowers the Covenanter martyrdoms as ‘tangible [and] permanent
. . . markers’, and makers, of Scottish history. In contrast, Neil Ramsey’s account
of British war memoirs of the earlier nineteenth century reveals how in a very
different milieu, emotions around war were generated by newly adapting genres
of writing. Faced with an audience emotionally educated by sentimental novels,
writers of ‘personal histories’ succeeded ‘because they wrote in such a way as to
redefine the hardships and the horrors of war as a version of an ennobling pastoral
experience in nature’. Increasingly, as the profession of war grew more scientific,
Ramsay traces the ways in which the public ‘were seen to have a connection with
war that was now to be almost wholly constituted by feeling and emotion’. As in
the medieval biographies examined by Taylor, the textual construction of emotions
in these related genres of ‘life writing’ may hide as much as it reveals of their real
place in war action and military culture.
Letters prove one of the most potent genres for combatants and non-combatants
alike from the early modern period. Susan Broomhall’s essay shows how French
court correspondence during the Italian Wars of the mid-sixteenth century both
‘forged a particular epistolary culture among . . . four individuals’ and ‘created
distinctive expressive capacity for feelings unique to their letters’. To Broomhall,
‘war was . . . a significant cultural force that provided the scaffolding of emotional
expression in these letters, and more broadly, of the “chivalric” practice and display
of feelings in the courtly environment’. Her analysis of the ‘feeling rules’ of letters
written under the influence of chivalric romance suggests that they distributed
opportunities and idioms for emotional expression unequally according to gender
and the changing court situation. Diana Barnes’ examination of plays written by
Margaret Cavendish during the aftermath of the English Civil War and the
Restoration also explores the emotional languages available to women in war, but
in the medium of theatre, considering the roles that might have been adopted by
elite women during the Early Modern period. Barnes shows how – in a post-war
civil context that privileges masculinist forms of ‘glory’, virtue and self-government
of the passions – Cavendish’s plays question gender divisions by providing ‘heroic’
models of female strength in portraits of women’s suffering, sympathy and
honourable action. Cavendish’s goal is ‘to preserve exemplary feminine virtue in
the national cultural memory’ and to represent women’s emotions as essential
to the maintenance of social and political stability.
‘History,’ write Michael Champion and Miranda Stanyon, ‘cannot escape
from the realms of literature and personal memoir into science or philosophy, from
emotional engagement and accident into detachment’. Their discussion of Thomas
de Quincey’s writings on war – and his writings about war – concludes this volume
with a reflection on the generically hybrid, often highly intertextual nature of such
work. De Quincey’s attempts to avoid the war narrative becoming a Words-
worthian ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ see him reaching back to
classical models of historiography, especially the writings of Thucydides, in forming
his own ‘feeling’ for the textual archive of war. The authors argue that attention
to De Quincey’s influences suggest ‘that we should rethink both the dichotomy of
form versus formlessness, and the equation of form with goodness’. There could
be no truer statement for the goals of this collection in thinking about the historical
relationship of war to emotion, which was understood etymologically in the early
modern period as a specifically political form of violent or chaotic upheaval

(Hochner 2016).
In writing about war writing and its forms – both in and across time – the essays
collected here seek to understand the ways in which words have shaped both war’s
affects and effects, its meanings and its memory, with a multivocality that both
constrains and liberates its subject. And yet war writing is not only a reflection,
past or present, on war’s losses. It may passionately celebrate war, or attempt to
incite the passions of (and for) war. Whatever its agenda, writing about war often
bears witness to an attempt to contain or control its violence; to direct its (human)
impact, whether past, present or future; to give form, definition and meaning to
its shapelessness. Order/disorder, control/chaos: the essays in Writing War attempt
to read the ways in which writing about war in the West repeatedly sought to
explain the emotional and practical mess of war with words.
Notes
1 See http://historiesofviolence.com.
2 For all references to Chaucer’s works, see The Riverside Chaucer (1987).
3 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Book 6, Chapter 32.
4 To Norris Lacy the same poem ‘dramatizes the sinister process by which political
manipulation . . . transforms a jovial court gathering into the prelude to a calamitous
war’ (Lacy 2000, p. 24).
5 Nichomachean Ethics, Book 3, Chapter 6:8.
6 www.people.virginia.edu/~mmd5f/memorial.htm
7 www.pbs.org/kenburns/civil-war/classroom/teaching-civil-war/
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Taylor & Francis
2
CONFESSING THE EMOTIONS
OF WAR IN THE LATE
MIDDLE AGES
Le livre du bon messire Jehan le Maingre,
dit Bouciquaut
Craig Taylor
Modern military historians have become increasingly interested in the combat

experience of soldiers. Studying the actions and emotions of those directly engaged
in the face of battle offers a crucial supplement to information gathered from the
lofty and potentially distant perspective of those in command, and more importantly
mitigates the risk of underestimating the brutal horror of war. Oral testimony,
letters, diaries and memoirs can offer valuable insight into the personal experience
of soldiers (Bourke 1999). Of course, such sources do need to be handled with
care: the passage of time inevitably risks distorting the representation of combat,
either because of lapses in memory or because of the influence of hindsight.
Moreover, when such records are prepared away from the battlefield, different
cultural and emotional pressures may also affect the evidence. In particular, military
veterans may struggle to process and to articulate the horrors and realities of war,
especially to those who have not shared their experiences (McLoughlin 2009;
2011; McLoughlin, Feigel & Martin 2017).
First-person accounts of war and the battlefield are very rare survivals from the
Middle Ages. The personal correspondence and diaries that are a staple source for
the modern military historian are almost completely absent. Few medieval soldiers
committed their experiences to writing and therefore most surviving accounts of
war were written by members of the clergy, who either mediated and filtered the
accounts of military veterans or simply imagined the battlefield, independent of
any first-hand knowledge. But, by the time of the Hundred Years War, a small
handful of veterans were writing chronicles, led by Jean Le Bel, Enguerrand de
Monstrelet and Jean de Wavrin, while others were the authors of military and
chivalric manuals, including Geoffroi de Charny, Thomas Gray, Philippe de
Mézières and Antoine de La Sale (Taylor 2013). All of these writers drew upon
and discussed their own personal experiences of war, though their works are still a
far cry from the military memoirs that began to appear in the early modern period,
24 Craig Taylor
and which were first foreshadowed by the unusual autobiographical Le Jouvencel

written by Jean de Bueil between 1461 and 1468 (Harari 2004; Ramsey 2011).1
The nearest medieval counterpart to the modern military memoir are the
biographies of aristocratic commanders, usually written by a companion-in-arms.
These narratives offered a very particular window into the military experiences
and emotions of veterans during the late medieval period. Such works typically
focused upon the lives of contemporary military leaders rather than the more
anonymous members of their armies. Moreover, the biographies deliberately
echoed chivalric romances that recounted the adventures of great heroes such as
King Arthur or Alexander the Great, thereby presenting contemporary warriors
as the counterparts of such legendary heroes and the embodiments of knightly
values (Gaucher 1994; Tyson 1998). Prominent examples include: Jean de Joinville’s
biography of the French King Louis IX written between 1305 and 1309; Guillaume
de Machaut’s celebration of King Peter I of Cyprus in La prise d’Alexandrie written
between 1372 and 1373; Cuvelier’s biography of the leading French military
commander Bertrand Du Guesclin completed by 1381; the Chandos Herald’s life
of the Black Prince written by 1385, but perhaps closer to the death of the Black
Prince in 1376; Le livre des fais of Jean II Le Meingre, known as Boucicaut,
completed in 1409; Jean Cabaret d’Orville’s chronicle of the life of Louis II duke
of Bourbon completed in 1429; and Guillaume Gruel’s biography of Arthur de
Richemont, written between 1458 and 1468 (Gaucher 1994; Tyson 1998).
In Le livre des fais, the biographer recounts the life of Jean II Le Meingre,
marshal of France, from his birth in 1366 up until 6 March 1409. Unusually, the
narrative was completed 12 years before the death of its subject (ed. Lalande 1985;
Lalande 1988). The anonymous author takes great pains to deny that Boucicaut
himself played any direct role in the creation of the biography, anxious to protect
the marshal from any accusations of self-promotion. Instead the author explains
that the book was commissioned
by a number of renowned knights and gallant noblemen who themselves

pursue noble and honourable deeds, and who knew the good and valiant
marshal who is our subject, and knew of his ancestors – there are still many
who are in that position.
(ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 10–11)2
There is no doubt that the book did genuinely spring from this close circle of
highly experienced military veterans. The biographer pays very close attention in
the narrative to the companions who fought and served alongside Boucicaut, led
by Jean d’Ony, Guillaume de Tholigny and his brother Hugues, Robert de Milly,
Hugues Cholet, Gilibert de La Fayette, Guillaume de Meuillon, Amanieu de
Montpezat, Jacques de Prades, Gilles de Preuilly, Macé de Richebaron and the
Bastard of Varannes. Moreover, the author repeatedly draws upon eye-witness
accounts of the military accomplishments of Boucicaut, particularly in the first
book recounting the start of his career up until the Nicopolis expedition of 1396,
Confessing the emotions of war 25
and also in the fourth book that offered a more abstract discussion of Boucicaut’s
exemplary qualities (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 10–11, 104, 417, 424–425, 427–428).
This hearsay is supplemented by transcriptions of official documents, from the
letter of the foundation of the knightly order that Boucicaut created on 11 April
1400 to the letter of defiance that the marshal sent to the Venetian doge and to
their admiral Carlo Zeno on 6 June 1404, as well as accounts of two important
diplomatic missions in 1407 and 1408 (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 164–171, 277–291,
347–356, 371–372).
The author of the biography does not identify himself, but it is likely that he
too was a member of this circle. Recent scholarship has debated whether Le livre
des fais was written by Nicolas de Gonesse, a graduate of the University of Paris
who served as Boucicaut’s confessor from at least 16 December 1406 (Millet 1995;
Lalande 1998). Gonesse was a celebrated writer, known above all for his completion
in 1401 of a French translation of Valerius Maximus’s Facta et dicta memorabilia that
had been started by Simon de Hesdin in 1375 on the orders of King Charles V
(Galderisi 2011, vol. 2, pp. 253–255). It seems likely that Gonesse did play some
role in the creation of Le livre des fais, given the heavy use of this French translation
of Valerius Maximus, which would not have been easy to access without his help
so soon after it was completed (Croenen, Rouse & Rouse 2002, pp. 263–265).
Yet upon closer examination, it is apparent that these citations are clustered in
the fourth and final book of the biography, which abandons the narrative of
Le Meingre’s story in favour of a more abstract manual or mirror for princes that
seeks to highlight his particular qualities as a leader. In contrast, the translation of
Valerius Maximus is only used or cited in nine out of the ninety-two chapters
of the previous three books of the biography, and then always to gloss and to
underscore a particular point in that narrative, such as the claim that Boucicaut
was a good man who had been undermined by jealous enemies and by perverse
popular opinion (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 99–101, 339–344, 438–447). Therefore,
it seems most plausible that Gonesse was employed to embellish the biography by
adding this fourth book that was finished on 9 April 1409 (ed. Lalande 1985, p.
456), and also by inserting comments and glosses into the life of Boucicaut that
was completed on or soon after 6 March 1409 (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 378).
Logic would suggest that the author of the narrative portion of the biography
was a more practical and experienced man than Gonesse. Jean d’Ony, for example,
would have been well placed to write such a narrative account. The level of detail
offered by the biographer significantly increases after 1400, when Ony had joined
the entourage of Boucicaut. The biography also reports the confidential instructions
that Boucicaut gave to Ony for his diplomatic missions, first to persuade the king
of Cyprus to join Boucicaut’s planned expedition to seize Alexandria in 1407, and
then when Ony met with Paolo Orsini in Rome in April 1408. If Ony were the
anonymous author of the main narrative, this might explain the lavish praise
heaped upon him for his military and diplomatic exploits. For example, the
biographer notes that Boucicaut selected Ony for the mission to Rome because
26 Craig Taylor
this member of the marshal’s entourage was known to be ‘valiant, wise, virtuous
and conscientious’. These qualities were on display during the subsequent
negotiations with Orsini in Rome, because Ony quickly sniffed out the betrayal
of Boucicaut by the Romans and rushed to pass the news to the marshal and his
fleet so that they could set out from Porto Venere on 25 April 1408.
In short, Le livre des fais was the product of a highly experienced circle of
military veterans and may have been written by one of those soldiers. But whether
the anonymous author was Jean d’Ony or not, it is striking that the writer offers
very few clues to his own identity and refrains from offering any personal reactions
to the unfolding stories except where such comments embellish the key themes
of the book. Moreover, the biographer largely refrains from putting words into
the mouth of his subject, shunning the practice of contemporary writers of chivalric
romances and also chroniclers who happily present dramatic speeches that reveal
the thoughts and emotions of their subjects. In the biography of Boucicaut, the
first-person speech of the marshal and his companions is rarely recorded. Instead,
the author prefers to allow Jean II Le Meingre to speak for himself through
official documents such as the letter of defiance that Boucicaut sent on 6 June
1404 to the doge of Venice, Michele Steno, expressing his outrage at the actions
of the Venetian fleet under the command of Carlo Zeno (ed. Lalande 1985,
pp. 277–291).
Indeed, if there is one emotion most commonly attributed to Boucicaut by his
biographer, it is anger. This is most evident in his response to the reported treachery
of the Venetians that undermined the marshal’s expedition in 1403, culminating in
their attack upon his fleet at Modone on 7 October (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 262,
267–268, 276, 277–291). The narrator reports that the Frenchmen taken prisoner
at Modone pleaded with Boucicaut to put aside his anger and desire for vengeance
that undermined their chance of securing their freedom, but that although Le
Meingre was moved to tears, he still could not abandon his plan to seek revenge
on the Venetians (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 272–274). This righteous anger on the part
of Boucicaut in the face of injustice is a common theme that runs throughout the
biography, closely linked to his overwhelming sense of pride. As a young man, he
frequently takes up arms in personal combat out of anger, like a figure from a
chivalric romance. For example, he responds to the insults of the Gascon Sicart de
La Barde (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 49–51) and wants to fight to avenge the Scottish
knight William Douglas after he is murdered by some Englishmen at Königsberg
in 1391 (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 76–77). During the fateful Nicopolis expedition of
1396, Le Meingre and the other French leaders are annoyed when their allies fail
to inform them quickly enough about the Turkish attack and are enraged at the loss
of their comrades (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 103, 108). Boucicaut is also angry that the
count of Périgord has revolted against the king the following year (ed. Lalande
1985, pp. 130–131). Later in the narrative, the marshal is reportedly outraged by
the treachery of the Pisans and their mistreatment of French prisoners in the
summer of 1405 (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 324–325, 320).
Early in the narrative, the biographer praises the young Boucicaut as a man who
has been inspired by ‘Love’, invoking commonplace ideas found in contemporary
romances and poetry; he also notes that Boucicaut was one of the authors of the
Livre des cent ballades, a collection of verses recounting a dialogue between a young
knight and a lady (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 27–32, 52). Yet in practice, the biography
provides very little detail regarding Boucicaut’s love either for his wife or during
his youth for the anonymous lady for whom he ‘felt all those pangs of love that
make loyal lovers so eager to see the object of their affections’ (ed. Lalande 1985,
p. 40). Far more common are discussions of male affection and friendship, though
even here the narrator offers modest and superficial comments. Early in his career,
Boucicaut enjoys the support of Louis II duke of Bourbon who is said to have been
very fond of the young man (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 43, 80). King Charles VI is also
described as having a great affection for Boucicaut, which the biographer illustrates
by citing a line from an anonymous ballade: ‘If you are loved, you’re not forgot,
Because you’re far away’ (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 78). The marshal is also said to have
enjoyed a close emotional bond with the men under his command. Describing
Boucicaut’s appointment to a command in the king’s expedition to Brittany in
1392, the biographer notes that a thousand men-at-arms are delighted to serve
under the marshal because of the affection that they feel and the respect that they
have for him (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 84). The biographer emphasises Boucicaut’s
love for his men, as demonstrated by the pity that he feels for them after the battle
of Modone in October 1403 when, ‘he was sick at heart at the thought of his
much-loved knights who had been taken prisoner’ (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 268).
When these men subsequently plead with him to make peace with the Venetians
to secure their release, ‘he could not for very nobleness of spirit prevent his tears,
so greatly was he moved to pity and affection’, though Boucicaut does not waver
in his desire to continue fighting (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 273).
The confession by Boucicaut that he is moved to tears by the fate of these
French prisoners of the Venetians is a rare discussion of sadness and grief on the
part of the marshal. As a young man, he is said to have felt pain at leaving behind
his unidentified lover, and later he is sad to be separated from his wife Antoinette
de Turenne (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 52–53, 205). But in general it is more common
for civilians to be described as sad or grief-stricken, and in particular the lovers
and wives of the knights. For example, the ‘grief, tears and sobs’ of the loved ones
of the Frenchmen who leave on the Nicopolis expedition foreshadow the ‘great
mourning’ that spread through France when news of the disaster arrives (ed.
Lalande 1985, pp. 92, 118–119). Indeed, the narrator offers a highly emotive
description of the fate of these Christians in the immediate aftermath of the battle,
making it difficult to know whether he himself has witnessed this heart-rending
scene, or is merely painting such a picture to affect his audience (ed. Lalande 1985,
pp. 113–117).
The biographer frequently notes the joy experienced by Boucicaut and others
in a perfunctory manner, without ever offering any real insight into the emotion
28 Craig Taylor
of such moments. Boucicaut’s men are often said to be happy after military
victories, such as Châteaumorand’s capture of a Saracen ship heading for Beirut in
August 1403 (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 244). French prisoners captured at Nicopolis
are also delighted to be released from captivity, and are greeted with great joy
upon their return home (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 122, 123, 126, 128). Immediately
after the great jousts held at Saint-Inglevert in March 1390, the biographer
underlines the accomplishments of Boucicaut and his companions by recording
the joyful welcome that they receive in Paris from the king and the court (ed.
Lalande 1985, p. 74). The narrative notes the same thing when Boucicaut returns
from Prussia and meets with the king in late December 1391; Charles VI is
‘naturally delighted’ to see Boucicaut (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 79). According to the
biographer, the citizens of Genoa also welcome Boucicaut with great joy and
delight when he first arrives in October 1401 (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 191). They
are similarly elated at the arrival of his wife Antoinette de Turenne in July 1402
and when the marshal returns to Genoa in October 1402 after the battle of
Modone: ‘no lord had ever been greeted with such warmth’ (ed. Lalande 1985,
pp. 205–206, 269). Finally, in late 1408, Boucicaut reaches the castle of Meyrargues
after a difficult journey and there his wife ‘was so overjoyed that she wept for love
and sheer happiness’ (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 382). Such accounts principally serve
to underline the marshal’s fame and the high esteem in which he is held. Indeed,
the narrator suggests that Carlo Zeno and the Venetians make every effort to
display joy and delight as they greet Boucicaut and his fleet in the summer of 1403,
‘so that they all seemed fast friends’, masking their treacherous plans to undermine
the Genoese expedition (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 215).
On a few rare occasions within the narrative, Boucicaut’s own joy is recorded
upon rejoining his own loved ones. In the spring of 1391, Geoffroy Le Meingre
travels to Prussia to join Boucicaut and the ‘two brothers were delighted to see
each other’ (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 75). More common are descriptions of Boucicaut’s
joy either at the chance to take up arms or in celebration of victory. For example,
he is described as being overjoyed at the news of the duke of Bourbon’s plan to
lead an expedition to Al-Mahdiya in 1390 and he is said to be delighted in July
1403 when a peace treaty between the king of Cyprus and Genoa gives him the
opportunity to launch the expedition that later attacked Beirut (ed. Lalande 1985,
pp. 74, 230).
In sum, the biography does consider Boucicaut’s emotions before or after battle,
but in a very limited fashion and there is almost no discussion of his immediate
reactions to violence itself. The narrative concentrates on the actions of its hero and
his companions – that is to say the deeds of arms identified in the title of the
biography – rather than on their emotions. The biographer recounts an over-
whelming list of expeditions, battles and encounters where Boucicaut and his circle
display prowess and courage, rarely pausing to interrogate the specific emotions
experienced by these Frenchmen. Early in the narrative, for example, the biography
describes the deeds performed by the young Le Meingre during the battle of
Roosebeke on 26 November 1382 (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 75). At one point, our
French hero faces a sturdy Fleming armed with a two-handed battleaxe who
contemptuously dismisses the smaller Boucicaut, declaring that ‘The French must
be short of decent men if they have to enlist children’. Yet it is Le Meingre who
emerges victorious in this encounter after stabbing his opponent with a dagger.
The incident highlights Boucicaut’s great prowess and courage in overcoming such
a significantly more powerful opponent. But the biographer characteristically offers
limited insight into the emotions of this highly charged moment, merely noting that
the Fleming has initially been contemptuous of Boucicaut and that the Frenchman
is anguished when he loses his own axe early in the struggle. Such details serve to
underline the dramatic turn of events when Le Meingre turns the tables on his
arrogant opponent, and then mocks the wounded man by asking him whether this
is a game for Flemish children.
The narrator does not present Boucicaut’s courage as a triumph over fear.
Indeed, the biographer scrupulously avoids giving any hint that the marshal or his
men are afraid in battle and there are very few occasions when the Frenchmen are
explicitly described as feeling fear. One example appears early in the biography,
when the author describes Le Meingre’s disappointment at the king’s refusal to
allow him to join Louis de Bourbon’s crusade to Al-Mahdiya in the summer of
1390. The author reports that Le Meingre felt fear (‘paour’) that King Charles VI
would revoke the permission that he granted Boucicaut later in that year to travel
to Prussia for the Reise (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 74–75). This is the exact opposite
of a cowardly fear of battle, and hence an honourable and worthy emotion.
Overall, Le livre des fais presents a very constrained representation of the emotional
responses of its subject, Jean II Le Meingre, and his companions, to the face of
battle. Very little attention is paid to their inner reactions to war, from the boredom,
homesickness and even melancholia of campaign to the sheer terror of combat
itself. This raises difficult questions regarding the ability of men like Boucicaut and
his circle to articulate their true experiences of war. Does the narrative reveal the
challenge that late medieval veterans faced in representing their personal experience
of war, and of processing and expressing the emotions of war, particularly for a
wider audience that had not experienced the battlefield? Or does Le livre des fais
illustrate a martial culture that actively sought to mask weakness and fear? The fact
that such heroic narratives concentrated upon the external demonstrations of
bravery and courage, rather than the inner emotional experiences of warriors might
suggest a deliberate conspiracy of silence regarding human weakness and insecurity
in the face of such awful conditions (Taylor 1999). It has even been suggested that
a textual culture that deliberately ignored the inner experiences, emotions or
sensations of warriors such as Boucicaut may itself have been constitutive of the
world of military combatants, encouraging them to worry more about their external
behaviour and the audiences to their actions than about their inner feelings (Harari
2004; 2005; 2008).
Yet there are reasons to be cautious before advancing such bold claims, at least
in relation to Le livre des fais. First and foremost, the biography of Boucicaut does
30 Craig Taylor
not mask the horror and fear of the battlefield, but rather denies that either the
marshal or his men are affected by this. A central theme of the narrative is the
stereotyping of Saracens as cowardly and fearful, and hence the stark contrast
between such enemies and the good Christians serving alongside Boucicaut.
During the attack on Candelore in late June 1403, for example, the marshal
conceives a cunning plan by which his men will pretend to be frightened and then
stage a feigned retreat to draw the ‘rats of Saracens’ into an ambush. The fact that
the French are pretending to be afraid serves to highlight the real terror of the
Saracen army who does indeed turn tail in the face of this ambush (ed. Lalande
1985, pp. 227–228).
Le livre des fais repeatedly underlines the fearfulness of the enemies of the
marshal. On 6 August 1403, Boucicaut’s force of around 2,000 men engages with
a Saracen army said to have numbered more than 15,000 at Tripoli. The fighting
is fierce and the biographer acknowledges that the Saracens initially defend
themselves with great ardour. But as the Christians renew their attack, their enemies
become dismayed and ultimately flee from the battlefield, and the magnitude of this
victory is emphasised by the narrator in citing the French translation and gloss on
Valerius Maximus that argues that ‘five hundred men of courage can often take
on as many as ten thousand’ (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 236–240). When the marshal
then staged a second attack against the Saracen positions, they again panicked and
fled in the direction of some overgrown gardens (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 241–243).
Six days later, when the French attack Sidon, the Saracens are initially courageous
but during the course of the battle become filled with fear in the face of the resolve
of the marshal’s army (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 248–250). The contrast between the
bravery of the Christians and the cowardice of their Saracen enemies is underlined
much later in the narrative, when the marshal sends ambassadors in August 1407
to encourage Janus, king of Cyprus, to join an expedition to capture Alexandria.
During the negotiations, the king declares that he has no fear of the sultan and his
men because of his first-hand experience of their cowardice, and that he is therefore
certain that a small number of good and well-trained men can overcome such an
enemy (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 259–360). The king subsequently decides not to join
Boucicaut’s proposed expedition but vigorously denies that this decision is motivated
by cowardice (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 362).
It is not only Saracens who demonstrate fear and cowardice in the biography
of Boucicaut. During the account of the battle of Nicopolis on 25 September
1396, the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid and his men are briefly alarmed by the valour
shown by the Frenchmen and put to flight, at least until the Turks realise that they
heavily outnumber their opponents (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 103). But the Hungarian
allies of the French are the ones who panic on the battlefield, from the very first
moment when the Turks first attack (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 106–107). The
biographer claims that most of the Hungarians are cowards and deserters who flee
in the face of the Turkish archers, thereby justifying his contention that they are
a people known to be reluctant to join battle. Indeed, the author even compares
the Hungarians to the wicked and cowardly followers of Christ who abandon him
when he is taken prisoner by his enemies (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 107).
This insistence upon the terror and cowardice shown by many of the Hungarians
serves to underline the biographer’s main contention that Boucicaut and the other
French crusaders demonstrate extraordinary courage in the face of extreme circum-
stances. These men reveal themselves to be ‘paragons of courage and defiance’ in
the face of the impending disaster (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 107). When Boucicaut
finally realises that defeat is inevitable, he feels not terror but grief and dismay, and
flings himself into the fray in order to ensure that his enemies will have to pay
dearly to kill him (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 111). At that crucial moment in the text,
the narrator calls upon the reader to recognise the tragedy at hand as Boucicaut is
risking his life so bravely, and also to feel pity for the French company that has
been deprived of support by their allies and has fallen victim to the cruelty of
their enemies. This justifies the eternal shame that the narrator seeks to heap upon
the Hungarians who have abandoned their allies and allowed the Turks to win the
battle (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 111–112). It also gives credence to the anonymous
author’s insistent denial of defamatory reports that many Frenchmen have actually
fled in the face of the Turks, and that the ensuing chaos has played a crucial role
in the defeat (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 104). This is a direct acknowledgement by the
biographer that there were severe criticisms in France of the lack of discipline,
organisation and courage shown by all the Christian warriors following the disaster
at Nicopolis, most noticeably voiced by Michel Pintouin in his Latin chronicle of
Saint-Denis (Gaucher 1996; eds Contamine & Paviot 2008).
Running through the narrative is an obsession with shame. The account of
Nicopolis is framed by the subsequent battle to identify those who are to blame
for the disaster and have therefore incurred eternal shame and opprobrium. The
biographer of Boucicaut not only denounces the defamation of reports that blame
all the Christians for the disaster, but also underlines his defence of the French
contingent by reporting, for example, that just one single Hungarian, Count
Nikola II Garai Miklós, stood firm alongside them in the battle, and that this man
was ‘filled with shame at the flagrant betrayal by the main body of Hungarians’
(ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 107, 110). In contrast, Boucicaut not only refuses to retreat
on the battlefield at Nicopolis, but also refuses to abandon the Frenchmen who
were taken prisoner: ‘If I left you here in so fearful a prison and fled to France, it
would rightly be thought heinous and dishonourable’ (ed. Lalande 1985, p. 123).
Fear of shame is consistently identified as a motivation for the actions of
Boucicaut and his men. The biography argues that Boucicaut and his men prefer
death to shame (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 408–410). In the account of the siege of
Oryahovo shortly before the battle of Nicopolis, the marshal is credited with a
rare battle oration, warning his men that they will be shamed if others cross the
bridge before them, and therefore urging them on to win honour and renown
(ed. Lalande 1985, p. 96). Shame also frames the account of the fateful expedition
of 1403 that culminates in the battle of Modone. The biographer presents
32 Craig Taylor
Boucicaut’s own letter to the Venetians written on 6 June 1404, which describes
the actions of Carlo Zeno and his men as ‘a source of shame and humiliation to
you and all your followers, showing as they do signal cowardice and disgrace’ (ed.
Lalande 1985, p. 288). Boucicaut declares himself willing to undertake a trial by
combat to defend this charge, echoing the other occasions in the narrative when
the marshal takes up arms out of righteous anger and to defend his own honour
(ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 288–289). Shame also motivates Boucicaut’s efforts to
launch a crusading campaign in 1407, when he seeks not only ‘to further the good
of Christianity and bring honour to knighthood’, but also to end ‘the suffering
and shame imposed on the Christians by their subjugation to the Saracens’ living
in the Holy Lands (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 344–345). A similar motivation to
protect others from shame underpins his earlier creation of the votive order of
La Dame Blanche à l’Écu Vert on 11 April 1400: he and 12 other knights take oaths
to take the field for any ladies of noble blood who lack a champion to defend their
honour (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 160–171).
The crucial point is that the biography itself was written as a defence of the
honour of Jean II Le Meingre. Le livre des fais presents a carefully constructed
defence of the actions of Boucicaut and his companions, not just during the
Nicopolis expedition but throughout his subsequent governorship of Genoa
following his appointment to that role by the French crown on 23 March 1401.
Like other chivalric biographers, the author of Le livre des fais claims that he is
writing to inspire the future generations of knights (ed. Lalande 1985, pp. 6–11,
447–451), but in fact such texts really served a more prosaic goal in defining the
reputation of their subjects. This is particularly true of Le livre des fais, which was
uniquely written while its subject was still alive, and hence less concerned with
commemorating its subject than shoring up his reputation for eminently practical
reasons. The book offers Boucicaut’s version of events during a controversial
period of 12 years, from the Nicopolis expedition in 1396 to his problematic
involvement in further unsuccessful crusading ventures and the papal schism,
all of which had inevitably called into question his abilities. Most important of all,
Boucicaut was under severe threat from opponents in the city of Genoa and the
region as a whole (Lalande 1988, pp. 98–165; Epstein 2001, pp. 257–260). On 16
November 1408, Gabriel Maria Visconti was arrested for his part in a Ghibellline
plot to take control of Genoa. Immediately afterwards, Pileo de Marini, archbishop
of Genoa, wrote to Paris, denouncing Le Meingre’s rule as governor and his
execution of Visconti for the plot (Puncuh 1978). Shortly after the biography was
completed, Boucicaut’s opponents took their chance to seize control of Genoa
when the governor briefly left the city. His lieutenant, Hugues Cholet, was killed
on the streets of the city on 3 September 1409 and three days later, Theodore II
Paleologus, marquis of Montferrat, was appointed as the captain of the people.
It was against this backdrop that Boucicaut’s friends prepared Le livre des fais,
almost certainly for the audience at the French court. Following the Genoese
uprising in September 1409, Boucicaut dispatched three envoys to Paris in March
1410 to appeal to the court for further financial support. They carried with them
a dossier detailing his financial accounts and presumably also Le livre des fais that
set out his version of events that had led Boucicaut to this perilous position. The
biographer complained vigorously about the lies about the marshal that had been
spread by the followers of the dukes of Orléans and Burgundy (Lalande 1988,
pp. 337–338), and the narrative carefully defends the Boucicaut’s judgement on
the different occasions when these princes of the blood undermined him, for
example in the aftermath of the disaster at Modone in 1403 and in the complex
negotiations relating to Pisa in 1406 (Lalande 1988, pp. 272–291, 331–336).
The very practical purpose of Le livre des fais helps to explain the choices made
by the author in constructing the narrative. The descriptions of emotion consistently
served to underline the case being presented, from Boucicaut’s righteous anger
against his enemies, to the powerful contrast between the courageousness of his
men and the fearfulness of their enemies. From a wider perspective, the biography
echoed contemporary chivalric romances in celebrating the adventures of its
protagonist and in the emphasis placed on his chivalric qualities. But where such
romances typically used direct speech to give the audience access to the inner
thoughts and emotions of a character, the biographer of Boucicaut carefully
avoided putting words into the mouth of its subject. The biographer also rarely
imposed his own voice as a narrator within the story, except as a commentator
underlining the specific message to be drawn from specific anecdotes. These
choices, together with the frequent resort to official documents, were intended to
enhance the authority of the biographer and his narrative (Brown-Grant 2011).
In other words, the fact that the narrative offers limited insight into the emotions
and inner experience of both Boucicaut and the biographer may have been
a deliberate, tactical choice in service to the primary goal of the text – that is to say
the presentation of the most convincing explanation for the marshal’s actions,
particularly as governor of Genoa. It would therefore be difficult to use a text such
as Le livre des fais as evidence in support of the intriguing notion that soldiers in the
late Middle Ages were emotionally constrained either because they lived in
a martial culture that focused upon the external rather than the internal, or, more
controversially, because they lacked the ability or interest to articulate their inner
experiences. The biography of Boucicaut may have been the product of a circle
of extremely experienced military veterans but, despite the claims of the author, it
is implausible that this work, which survives in just one incomplete manuscript,
was really intended to be an educational tool for young warriors or a simple mirror
to the lives of military veterans. Rather, the biography was a carefully constructed
defence of the actions of Boucicaut and his circle, artfully and manipulatively
employing a range of techniques including the rhetoric of emotions to target a
specific courtly audience. The goal of the text was to defend the public actions and
behaviour of its subject, and therefore the narrator’s interest in the emotions
and inner experience of Boucicaut was always channelled towards that goal. It
would therefore be wrong to read the limited discussion of the emotional experience
of violence and the battlefield in Le livre des fais as evidence to support Harari’s
34 Craig Taylor
contention that veterans like those in service to Boucicaut had no interest in, or
more importantly, no ability to express their reactions to such matters.3
Notes
1 Michelle Szkilnik is currently completing a new scholarly edition of Le Jouvencel.
2 All translations come from C. Taylor & J. H. N. Taylor (trans) 2016.
3 My monograph on Boucicaut and Le livre des fais will be published by York Medieval
Press in 2019.
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Taylor & Francis
3
EMOTION AND MEDIEVAL
‘VIOLENCE’
The Alliterative Morte Arthure and
The Siege of Jerusalem
Andrew Lynch
The close relation of ‘violence’ to emotion in medieval and Early Modern Europe
was a major topic for twentieth-century historians and continues to attract close
attention (Broomhall & Finn 2015; Bellis & Slater 2016). As Susan Broomhall has
recently remarked of the work of Johan Huizinga and Norbert Elias, ‘[b]oth
appeared to understand the violence and the affective behaviours of medieval
people as one and the same phenomen[on]’ (Broomhall 2015, p. 4). Broomhall
goes on to stress the key role of conceptual definitions in establishing the relation
of emotion to violence, ‘for these terms cannot be assumed to have shared
meanings among disciplinary traditions, nor indeed among past and present
populations’ (Broomhall 2015, p. 5). In this essay, as an attempt to add clearer
definition to the medieval concept of ‘violence’, or at least to avoid some confusion,
I discuss the place of emotion in the construction and evaluation of ‘violent’
bodily actions in later medieval English war writings. Together with brief reference
to early and late medieval poetic works, I pay special attention to two texts. One
is the Alliterative Morte Arthure, a late fourteenth-century poem in the Arthurian
tradition stemming from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 1130s Historia regum Brittanie.
In this story, Roman ambassadors arrive in Britain and demand that Arthur pay
tribute to the Emperor as overlord. In response, Arthur begins a new campaign
against the Roman Empire, defeats the Emperor’s forces, and is just about to win
Rome itself when he hears that Mordred and Guinevere have rebelled and seized
power in Britain. He returns and puts down the rebellion, but is killed in the last
battle and is buried at Glastonbury. The other text is The Siege of Jerusalem, another
anonymous alliterative poem, variously dated as between 1370 and 1400. It
describes the total destruction of Jerusalem in CE 70 after a siege led by the
Romans Vespasian and Titus. It is often, and very understandably, described as an
unpleasantly violent work (Pearsall 1977, p. 169).
38 Andrew Lynch
The word ‘violence’ had a different meaning in medieval times from that
which it has today. In modern usage ‘violence’ primarily refers to ‘[t]he deliberate
exercise of physical force against a person, property, etc’. Medieval usages of
‘violence’ refer, by contrast, to a former, now obsolete meaning: ‘the abuse of
power or authority to persecute or oppress’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2017,
violence, n. 1a). Anglo-Norman violence (the source of the English word) also
supports the now obsolete meaning (Anglo-Norman Dictionary 1992, violence, s.).
Medieval usages of ‘violent’ and ‘violence’, as they are applied to human actions,
exclude many modern associations of the word because they always involve a
judgement identifying some specially wrongful or dangerous use of force or
superior power; these are misdirected, inappropriate, excessive, abusive, destructive
or tyrannical acts and effects, rather than a description of physically aggressive
actions and events in general.1 They are instances of ‘unreasonable violence’,
which was to be avoided because it ‘discredited not only a particular enterprise
but the entire “just war” theory as well’ (Allmand 1999, p. 259). The general
meaning of the medieval term is closer to modern ‘violation’. Accordingly, it can
be misleading to regard what modern Western culture calls ‘violence’ – fights
and wars, for example – as instances of ‘violence’ in medieval understanding.
If ‘violence’ involves the breaking of an explicit or implicit protocol, the term
seems inappropriate for medieval fighters apparently represented as doing as they
should, or to those battles in which normal rules are followed, however bloody
the results. In much medieval literature if acts of physical force are shown as ‘true
to form’, in line with generic convention, they are not presented as violent but as
proper and socially beneficial. The judgement of right and wrong uses of force is
always to some extent a response to aspects of form, including literary form and
the emotive features of texts that direct readerly alignment towards character
and action.
That is not, of course, to deny that medieval wars, like all wars, were very
‘violent’ in the modern sense (Hanley 2003, pp. 42–45), but to warn against the
confusion of two different historical and evaluative frameworks in analysing
medieval writings about war and combat. Without maintaining the distinction
between these two meanings of ‘violence’, we may miss understanding the ways
in which medieval literature both supports and critiques the motives and conduct
of warfare. In particular, we may overlook the manner in which this literature
relates judgement of physical force both to ethics and to emotion. In the discourse
of medieval war poetry, descriptions of killing and maiming, including the
Alliterative Morte’s ‘obsession with the visual detail of damaged and dying bodies’
(Baden-Daintree 2016, p. 57), are likely to be treated as ethically and emotionally
positive, indeed honorific, matters, and presented to readers as honourable to
behold. On the other hand, a condemnation of ‘violence’ may be sustained by a
cool analysis of the circumstances in which an action is taken, with no graphic
detail at all supplied.
The work of Chaucer provides instructive examples. The Tale of Melibee is an
exercise in the tradition of prudential counsel. King Melibee is the victim of
Emotion and medieval ‘violence’ 39
an unprovoked assault and angrily plans vengeance, but his adviser Dame Prudence
refers to his proposed reaction of punitive war as a ‘violence’:
And if ye seye that right axeth [asks] a man to defenden violence by violence
and fightyng by fightyng, certes ye seye sooth, whan the defense is doon
anon withouten intervalle or withouten tariyng or delay, for to deffenden
hym and nat for to vengen hym [avenge himself]. And it bihoveth that a
man putte swich attemperance in his deffense that men have no cause ne
matiere to repreven hym that deffendeth hym of excesse and outrage, for
ellis were it agayn resoun.
(Chaucer The Tale of Melibee, in Benson 1990, p. 232)
Prudence’s stipulation of the strict limits within which physical force may justifiably
be used shows how such judgements of ‘violence’ belong to an ethical and
relatively unemotional register of discourse. By contrast, in the Knight’s Tale,
Chaucer shows how differently a punitive war – waged by Thesesus against Creon
out of pity for the Theban widows – looks within the discourse of chivalry:
Thus rit [rides] this duc, thus rit this conquerour,

And in his hoost of chivalrie the flour,
Til that he cam to Thebes and alighte
Faire in a feeld, ther as he thoughte to fighte.
(Chaucer The Knight’s Tale, in Benson 1990, ll. 981–984)
Prudence’s critique of ‘violence’ finds no place here because in this kind of

language the conqueror’s motives and conduct appear unquestionably ‘faire’, a
term that combines ethical and aesthetic approval. The Knight’s Tale must employ
other strategies to disrupt the smooth surface of chivalric war writing: a tour of
the field strewn with bodies after the battle, and the miscellaneous semi-realist,
semi-allegorical imagery of the Temple of Mars, where the grim and inglorious
effects of war are shown.
Without some privileging of ethical judgement, or at least some suspension or
disruption of chivalric language, charges of violence scarcely come into play in
medieval texts. The word is rarely used in cases where modern writers would
habitually use it, for example in relation to the fights and other aggressive behaviours
described in Huizinga’s famous opening chapter translated as ‘[t]he violent tenor
of life’, which became, in a later translation, ‘[t]he passionate intensity of life’
(Huizinga 1924; 1996). ‘Violence’ is an identification inseparable from language
which specifically encodes the cognitive, ethical and emotional grounds of ‘violent’
action. We cannot establish what it means ‘in itself’ as a known entity: it can only
occur and be known historically, in its time, place and culturally situated utterance.
Where one medieval writer rejoices in the noble scene of warfare, noting who
‘does well’, another writer, working from different ethical premises and in a
40 Andrew Lynch
different generic register, will represent the same deeds as pathological violence
(Lynch 2016).
To give an idea of the vagueness that has surrounded the term ‘violence’ in
its relation to medieval war: one essay collection on ‘the impact of violence
on society in medieval and early modern Europe’ includes a study of the ‘Peace
of God’ movement in thirteenth-century Aquitaine, which was designed to
protect the church and the peasants from attack (Frassetto 1998). Another book
on ‘interpreting medieval violence’ begins with an essay on Wiglaf’s role in
the dragon fight in Beowulf (Hill 2004). In one case, church authorities formally
identify certain sections of society as illegitimate targets of military force, effectively
casting aggression against them as a form of ‘violence’. In the other, a young
warrior achieves glory by helping to kill an enemy destroying his people, and,
specifically, by aiding the kinsman and the lord to whom he owes allegiance.
We are told that Wiglaf is doing what he should: ‘swylc sceolde secg wesan, þegn
æt ðearfe’ – ‘so should a warrior be, a thane in need’ (Beowulf, ll. 2708–2709).
It is clear that while both these examples are related to instances of ‘violence’ in
the general modern sense, in one case only is the action or physical force concerned
ideologically and institutionally established as ‘violent’. Wiglaf’s actions by contrast,
are seen as praiseworthy and absolutely normative; not to act in that way violates
an obligation. Violence is an ideological and institutional category, and an ethical
interpretative category, not one simply established by identification of the use of
force.
Nevertheless, something these two examples do have in common is emotion:
strong feelings that conduce to action. Wiglaf does not only respond to Beowulf’s
plight with a cognitive sense of obligation; it is felt. The poet highlights Wiglaf’s
strong emotions: ‘hiora in anum weoll / sefa wið sorgum sibb aefre ne mæg / wiht
onwendan þam ðe wel þenceð’ – ‘The heart of one of them surged with sorrows;
kinship can never change in one who thinks rightly’ (Beowulf, ll. 2599–2601); ‘his
heart was sad in him’ – ‘him wæs sefa geomor’ (Beowulf, l. 2632); he beholds
Beowulf’s dead body ‘earfoðlice’ – ‘painfully’ (Beowulf, l. 2822). Emotion drives
his actions and models a correct emotional reaction for the audience. Similarly,
the Peace of God could only be enforced when those who were militarily powerful
were also afraid of spiritual penalties such as excommunication and denial of burial
in consecrated ground. Churchmen decreed that killing peasants was wrong, but
it was only the emotions that religious sanctions aroused in soldiers that could
make the decrees effective (Frassetto 1998, pp. 18–20). Whether the result is to
take or to limit actions involving physical force, and to approve them or deplore
them, emotion figures in the judgement. As a corollary, the emotions elicited by
witnessing extreme force will depend on cognitive alignments: the torments of
Christ demand deep pity; those of a traitor are cause for laughter and satisfaction.2
The emotions stirred or calmed by witnessing an event make it a ‘violence’ or not,
in a way that shows the intersection of emotional, ideological and ethical
judgements.
The kinds of questions asked in the Middle Ages about the use and abuse of
physical force, and the ways they are answered, are always interactive with existing
emotional regimes. They help to construct and modify these regimes, which are
themselves always politically situated. The extension or refusal of emotional
sympathy to particular actions, individuals and groups, and the narrative evocation
of particular emotional repertoires concerning them, are institutionally and
politically related matters (Reddy 2001; Colwell 2016). As Daniel Gross (2006,
p. 4) puts it:
the contours of our emotional world have been shaped by institutions . . .

that simply afford some people greater emotional range than others, as they
are shaped by a publicity that has nothing to do with the inherent value of
each human life, and everything to do with technologies of social recognition
and blindness.
Narrative genres and poetic strategies feature prominently among these technologies
of recognition and repression. In complex poetic narratives, ideological and
political evaluations are discovered or inferred from the emotional colour of
each descriptive moment at its own place in the text. And, more specifically in
the war poems I am considering, acts of force serve as focal points for emotional
depictions and arousals that provide the narrative’s most valued narrative currency
and create the most intense impression of what the poetry is ‘for’: in these
depictions emotion is at once a medium, an effect and a goal. Later medieval
literary texts on war are quite rarely structured around philosophical or ethical
propositions. In them, we are not often dealing with a clear ‘concept’ of ‘war’ or
‘right’, but with what Tomaž Mastnak – rejecting terms such as ‘the concept of
crusade, or ‘the crusade idea’ – calls instead ‘something much vaguer, a magma
of images, beliefs, fantasies, expectations, feelings, and sentiments’ (Mastnak 2002,
p. 56). To know how these texts establish and manage their inter-related ethical
and emotional judgements about war is therefore necessarily a matter of literary
analysis.
I. The Alliterative Morte Arthure

In later medieval English war literature, the merits of physically aggressive acts are
not often discussed consistently according to a patent ethical system, and their
descriptions usually omit explicit assessment of motivation. That effect is
compounded in medieval alliterative verse narrative through its formal tendency
to create a sequence of discrete narrative events – moral topoi, set speeches,
summary catalogues, fights, rituals and descriptive loci – which establish their own
separate significance and do not necessarily construct or appeal to an evident
overall framework for interpretation. The Alliterative Morte Arthure is regularly
seen as ‘a fundamentally fragmented, fractured text’ (Nievergelt 2010, p. 91).
42 Andrew Lynch
We see this tendency in the very first lines of the poem, which invoke a long –
term view of the narrative course, on a different scale and in a different evaluative
mode from its detailed account of subsequent events. These lines may be read as
anticipating the sad ending of the narrative – the final failure of Arthur’s campaign –
which is then obscured throughout nearly all of what follows:
Now grete glorious God through grace of Himselven

And the precious prayer of his pris Moder
Sheld us fro shamesdeede and sinful workes
And give us grace to guie and govern us here
In this wretched world through virtuous living
(AMA 1–5)3
The poem’s summary view that this is a ‘wretched world’ can co-exist in different
ways with its apparent enthusiasm for British prowess and conquest. It may be
endorsing them as an example of ‘virtuous living’ in a world where wickedness is
always present. The lines may also be read as exculpatory of Arthur’s wars – he
cannot be blamed for the failed outcome of his campaign against Rome, surely
already known to readers and hearers, because the world is such an uncertain and
wicked place. On the other hand, perhaps the opening provides a conceptual
frame that limits the extent and the value of human agency, and leaves in question
whether Arthur’s actions in a ‘wretched world’ are ‘sinful workes’ or ‘virtuous
living’. Perhaps, in this large-scale view, emotional excitation towards an earthly
goal would in itself be a part of human weakness, imperceptive of the need for
divine grace, for all Arthur’s many later claims to be a religious champion.
A further narrative check on the story’s apparent enthusiasm for war is its
scene-specific, disunifying treatment of character and motivation. While Mordred
and Guinevere bear long-term ethical responsibility for the results of their treachery,
their emotional credit at each stage of the story is rather detached from their
involvement in future or past events. They act and react emotionally in more
complex ways than their role as traitors in the plot would suggest. They seem not
to possess essentially bad emotional motivations, but to accrue bad motivations
circumstantially within the overall development of the action, so that blame for
the bad outcome is not solely theirs. Even when a prior knowledge of the story
can create a simple ‘dramatic irony’, unexpected emotional counter-effects of
character ensue. For instance, Guinevere’s grief at Arthur’s departure to conquer
Rome is genuine when it occurs, though we know she will later betray him with
Mordred. Her comment, ‘I may werye the wye thatt this war moved’ – ‘I may
curse the man who urged this war’ (AMA 699), shows an instinctive foresight that
critiques Arthur himself, and underlines the mistaken confidence of his campaign:
‘it shall to good turn!’ (AMA 706). Mordred at this time seems not so much
a villain in disguise as a man who fears, though he cannot know, his still-obscure
future as traitor. The poem’s grief-work for Gawain, its favourite son, is later
movingly carried on in a speech by Mordred himself (AMA 3874–3885).
Despite the bellicose and simply antagonistic tone of much of the narrative, the
potential it affords for ethical and emotional readings of the action is not fully
controlled by sympathy and approval for Arthur’s ambitions and condemnation of
his enemies. We are allowed to think at times that the king’s keenness for war
creates the circumstances for his betrayal, and that it would have been better for
him never to have broken the 12-year peace that reigned before the Roman
ambassadors arrived.
Overall, evaluating the moral status of armed force in this story is a difficult
business. The poem’s beginning apparently offers an enthusiastic endorsement of
warfare conducted by the right people:
And I shall tell you a tale that trew is and noble

Of the real renkes of the Round Table
That chef were of chivalry and cheftains noble
Both wary in their workes and wise men of armes,
Doughty in their doings and dredde ay shame
(AMA 16–20)
But, on a more careful reading, one realises that exactly what the poem is claiming
here about Arthur and his men depends partly on the force one gives to the
unalliterating final fourth stress in the verse lines. The grandiloquent sweep of the
verse seems to celebrate Arthurian wisdom as well as prowess, but the less obtrusive
ending to the line specifies only that they are wise in ‘armes’. So one has to
wonder if the prudent actions (‘wary . . . workes’) that we hear about refer only
to short-term campaign and battle tactics, rather than deeper applications of
foresight and wisdom. Does success in battle really count for other ‘wise’ and
‘noble’ virtues as well, or is the poem only setting up a seductive invitation for
readers to think so, perhaps later to be corrected? When we are told that the ‘tale’
is ‘true’ and ‘noble’, do we associate those qualities particularly with the brave
‘doings’ of the ‘noble’ chieftains who figure in it, or with other instructive
possibilities? The narrator, more in the manner of a preacher than a romance
writer, hopes that his words will be ‘[p]lesand and profitable to the pople that
them heres’ (AMA 11; Werster 1994, p. 55), but does not indicate exactly where
the pleasure or the profit will be found.
In direct speech – a major part of the narrative – a similar effect of splitting
occurs. At first sight, emotional arousal seems to guide characters’ declared
evaluations of the action, or even to override them: action, emotional attachment
and ethical approval appear to work together. Still, when King Aungers declares
that Arthur is ‘wisest and worthyest and wightest [strongest] of handes, / The
knightlyest of counsel that ever crown bore’ (AMA 290–291), or a Roman senator
says ‘He may be chosen cheftain, chef of all other / Both by chaunces of armes
and chevalry noble, / For wisest and worthyest and wightest of handes’ (AMA
530–532), how much should the qualification ‘of handes’ shape and limit the
reader’s notion of Arthur’s wisdom, worthiness and strength? Does the praise
44 Andrew Lynch
extend to all these attributes or only his battle prowess? Or is he wisest and
worthiest only so long as he is militarily strongest? And does ‘knyghtlyest’ counsel
in a crowned king mean the highest kind of counsel, or the one most likely to
please the tendencies of knights? More generally, how does success in the ‘chaunces
of armes’, leading to supreme individual power, relate to wisdom and worthiness
per se? Is it possible that the text looks forward here to the dream-scene of
Fortune’s wheel and the king’s sudden fall (AMA 3370–3390)? There it seems that
Arthur’s previous success in war – his ‘chaunces’ – have lured him on towards
Rome only to destroy him, with no sense that good or bad qualities and motivations
have had any part to play. Fortune is concerned only with material gain and loss,
making her reference to Christ seem deeply sardonic:
‘King, thou carpes [complain] for nought, by Criste that me made!

For thou sall lose this laik [game / pleasure] and thy life after;
Thou has lived in delite and lordshippes ynow [enough]!’
(AMA 3385–3387)
Even if readers do not make that long-range connection between scenes, the
uncertain limits of the poem’s praise for Arthur’s virtue may still permit a response
to the narrative that escapes emotional attachment to the means by which victory
is won – strong leadership and strength in battle – and so resists implicitly treating
them as endorsements of the king’s moral aims and conduct. All the knightly
participants, whether friends or enemies, show a great respect for chivalric prowess,
but readers are also made aware that judgements of ‘chivalry’ or ‘violence’ are
relative and perspectival. The Roman ambassadors praise Arthur’s might in itself,
but condemn him for his earlier conquest of Gaul and other places – ‘thow has
ridden and raimede [robbed] and ransound þe pople [held the people to ransom]’
(AMA 100). They make, in effect, an accusation of ‘violence’ in medieval terms,
but not out of any fundamental opposition to warfare as violent in itself. It is on
the basis that he is ‘rebel to Rome’ (AMA 103) in withholding or intercepting
revenues due to it, and therefore acting without a proper warrant. At the time it
is made, the charge is angrily and patriotically denied. Arthur denies any allegiance
to Rome, and claims his own right to its empire, but later events may allow
readers to revisit this moment and judge differently.
Arthur’s dream of himself and the rest of the Nine Worthies thrown from
Fortune’s wheel strongly contests the previous emotionally-charged endorsement
of his campaign, amounting to suggestions of a Holy War, given the extensive
reference to the non-Christian allies of the Romans and their exotic entourage
(AMA 570–609, 2283–2288). Arthur goes to bed promising a Crusade ‘[t]o
revenge the Renk [Man] that on the Rood died!’ (AMA 3217) after he has taken
Rome – a ‘delirious messianic ambition’ (Nievergelt 2010, p. 89). He awakes
shivering with cold, as if he were about to die. Arthur’s ‘philosopher’, purportedly
an ethically independent voice in the poem, treats the dream as a sign that Fortune
has deserted the king forever, and foretells that within 10 days he will hear of
trouble at home (Mordred’s rebellion). In addition, the philosopher uses the dream
as an occasion to condemn Arthur retrospectively as an unjustified invader of
foreign countries, an arrogant killer of the innocent:
‘Thou has shed much blood and shalkes destroyed,

Sakeles, in surquidrie, in sere kinges landes;
Shrive thee of thy shame and shape for thine end.
....
Found abbeyes in Fraunce, the fruites are thine owen,
For Frolle and for Feraunt and for thir fers knightes
That thou fremedly in Fraunce has fey beleved.’
(AMA 3398–3405)
‘You have shed much blood, and destroyed innocent men, through your
arrogance, in many kingdoms. Confess your shameful deeds and prepare for
your end. . . . Found abbeys in France – the benefits will be your own –
for Frollo and Feraunt and for their keen knights whom you, as a foreign
intruder, have left dead in France.’
References here to Arthur’s arrogance and sinfulness, and to his campaigns as an

alien intrusion into France and numerous other places, clearly represent his warfare
as a sinful and shameful ‘violence’. Yet one presumes that the speaker is one of
the two ‘sage philosophers’, ‘cunningest of clergy’, who interpreted his earlier
dream of the fight between the dragon and bear, en route to Normandy at the start
of the campaign. In that reading, Arthur is told he has previously won all his
kingdoms by ‘right’, that the dream enemy refers to violent, and therefore
legitimate, targets – including ‘tyrauntes that tormentes thy pople’, taking his claim
to imperial lordship for granted – and he is urged to continue his campaign and
go on to victory ‘through help of Our Lord’ (AMA 806–831). The contrast is
startling.
What is happening in this apparent radical reorientation of the clerical
commentary? Is it merely that the new context of mutability and approaching
death – all the Jewish and Pagan Worthies are already dead, and the Christian
Worthies will also die – brings out a new generic emphasis on the need for
repentance and minimising punishment in the next life? Possibly there is meant
to be a more thorough ethical re-appraisal of the king’s whole career, stretching
back to his previous conquest of France, as well as the current campaign against
Rome in which he has destroyed churches and hospitals (AMA 3038–3039;
Kennedy 2015, pp. 111–112). Perhaps it is a simpler matter: that Arthur has always
been an acquisitive hostage to Fortune, empowering her hold over him by his
relentless ambition, and the changed assessment of his warfare merely reflects the
harsh difference between winning and losing. When pursuing the ‘chances of
armes’ turns out badly, attitudes to the value of maintaining the king’s ‘right’ to
46 Andrew Lynch
conquest change too, along with the praise or blame that he gets for a campaign.
Fourteenth-century English kings had wide experience of both outcomes (Given-
Wilson 1997, pp. 116–123). In this light, perhaps the philosopher’s moral comments
are as responsive to Fortune as anything else in the poem.
Nevertheless, adding more uncertainty to judgement, the philosopher tones
down his adverse finding by interspersing critique and calls to repentance with
comments that link Arthur with Charlemagne and Godefroi of Bouillon as great
warriors for Christ,4 and by attributing the king’s loss of rule to ‘wicked men’
(AMA 3447). He also promises Arthur both earthly and heavenly reward for his
military prowess, in much the same terms.
‘This [The Nine Worthies] shall in romaunce be redde with real [royal]
knightes,
Reckoned and renownd with riotous [bellicose] kinges,
And deemed [judged] on Doomesday for deedes of armes,
For the doughtiest that ever was dwelland [living] in erthe;
So many clerkes and kinges shall carp [sing / recite] of your deedes
And keep your conquestes in cronicle for ever’
(AMA 3440–3445)
Christ in judgement, it seems, will personally praise Arthur for battle prowess. All
of a sudden, the distance between military and moral understandings of conquest
collapses, and no difference is made between the glory conferred by a ‘romance’,
such as the one we are reading, and the reward of God in Heaven.
This is an extreme moment of Christian endorsement of Arthur, but not an
isolated one. At many stages in the story, his mission is treated in the terms of later
medieval piety, redolent of hagiography and miracle literature. He swoons on the
dead Gawain’s body, then treats it as a relic, and gathers up the blood in a helmet:
‘It were worthy to be shrede [clothed] and shrined in gold,

For it is sakless [guiltless] of sin, so help me our Lord!’
(AMA 3991–3992)
Gawain too sees his role as religious, as a Crusader against Rome’s Saracen allies:
‘We shall end this day als excellent knightes,

Ayer [Go] to endless joy with angeles unwemmed [immaculate];
Though we have unwittyly [unwisely] wasted ourselven,
We shall work all well in the worship of Crist!’
(AMA 3800–3803)
In such scenes, the poem manages its evaluation of the use of force through a
regulated excitation and direction of emotional energy: we are exhorted to feel
for Gawain; we feel the extent of his loss by feeling how much Arthur (and even
Mordred) feel for him. The intimate and unconditional emotional attachment that
the poem demands for its heroes matches and motivates a pious hostility towards
the Other. As readers participate in this emotional economy, they are encouraged
to feel the sorrow, pity and anger elicited by the text as conferring both holy
benefits and obligations. In the words of Catherine Nall, within late medieval war
literature pity is ‘the emotion that acts as a precursor to vengeance; as one that,
far from limiting bloodshed, forms a crucial part of the affective foundation of
the practice of violence’ (Nall 2019, 74). Arthur’s extreme display of sorrow at
Gawain’s death is only publicly tolerable if it feeds vengeance on his killer,
Mordred; otherwise it will be scorned as womanish, ‘bootless bale’ – ‘useless grief’
(AMA 3976). Grief and vengeance are parts of the one impulse, heightened by
blood-relationship as well as religious and chivalric fellowship. The veneration of
Gawain’s blood provides an intimate emotional bond between readers and the
king, and the rightness of the feeling endorses the revenge as just.
The emotional intensity of such moments complicates reflection on their
broader ethical context by invoking the feeling rules of a military caste; here a
limited form of fellow feeling takes up the affective space. To a very large extent
religion is made both a sanction and an intensifier in that process, not a curb on
it. There is an ethical voice that asks empathy for the ‘innocent’ and ‘foreign’
victims of Arthur’s invasion – and so briefly characterises his wars as a ‘violence’,
the wrongful ‘shed[ding]’ of ‘much blood’ – but that too becomes largely subsumed
into the commemoration of the king’s greatness and the mourning for his end.
The poem’s strategic regulation and direction of emotional attachments, embedded
as they are within descriptions of the action, largely protects its wars from critique.
On the other hand, by taking the wider view that the poem intermittently
establishes when considering the entire course of the king’s career – whether in
summary mode, as in the beginning, or through the dream symbolism of the
Wheel of Fortune – a less emotional, more coolly critical assessment of Arthur’s
actions is permitted. Paradoxically, (and in contrast to the views of Huizinga and
Elias), the increase of emotional heat and inclusion of graphic battle detail in the
conduct of the narrative presents Arthur’s actions as less, rather than more, ‘violent’
in medieval terms, because such a strategy of representation shows them as rightly
motivated in feeling, and properly directed at notorious enemies. The outrage
Arthur expresses vouches for these acts as justified, and not excessive or tyrannical.
Yet we can also see that such emotions, though heartfelt, are not innocent of
political purpose. They belong to a contemporary kingly repertoire of emotional
display and control (Radulescu 2016, pp. 106–108). Anger, grief and love, expressed
through discourses of chivalry, religion and family, and enacted in ‘countenance’,
bodily movements and rituals, are shown as very effective means to bind the king’s
forces together and to both motivate and justify the courses of action he desires.
To what extent the intense emotions expressed by the text’s major figures,
especially Arthur and Gawain, truly provide virtuous models of feeling and benign
48 Andrew Lynch
sources of emotional contagion for readers outside the text remains a question.
How it is answered will decide whether or not Arthur’s wars are ‘violent’.
II. The Siege of Jerusalem

The late fourteenth-century English alliterative poem The Siege of Jerusalem is very
commonly described today as an extremely violent work, and deservedly so. Yet
such a judgement will be misleading if it draws attention from the work’s self-
presentation as an account of just vengeance.
The background to the poem is a conversion story that establishes an overriding
emotional context for what follows. The Roman general Vespasian is miraculously
cured of illness by hearing of the Vernicle, and becomes a fervent Christian, along
with his son Titus. They take up Nero’s quarrel with Judaea over non-payment
of taxes, and transform it into a mission of vengeance on the Jews in Jerusalem for
their treatment of Christ:
‘Cytees vnder Syon, now is ȝour sorow uppe.

Þe deþ of þe dereworþ crist der schal be ȝolden.
Now is Bethleem þy bost ybroȝt to an ende,
Jerusalem & Ierico forjuggyd wrecchys.
Schal neuer kyng of ȝour kynde with croune be ynoyntid,
Ne Jewe for Jesu sake iouke in ȝou more.
(SJ 295–300)5
‘Cities under Zion, now your sorrow begins. The death of the precious
Christ shall be paid for dearly. Now, Bethlehem, your boasting is brought
to an end; Jerusalem and Jericho are condemned wretches. Never shall a
king from your race be annointed and crowned, and no more shall any Jew
live within you, for Jesus’s sake.’
The poem goes on to fulfill this warning in horrific detail, as the Jews are
slaughtered in battle and reduced to famine by siege, their city utterly destroyed
and their remnant sold into slavery.
Despite this framing story, it has been argued that the Siege contains an element
of sympathy for the Jews. Christian readers of this poem, c. 1390, in an England
from which Jews had been expelled a century before, were accustomed to under-
stand religious and devotional references to ‘Jerusalem’ as applying typologically
to the Christian community. Such readers might have identified with the sufferings
of the Jews of the poem, and learned to fear a similar divine vengeance for sin,
‘[f]or in the Jews, medieval exegetes saw themselves’ (Yeager 2004, p. 95). Given
the medieval belief that the Crusaders’ failure to keep control of Jerusalem was
due to the immorality of Christians (Mandeville 1967, p. 101), together with the
growing fear of attack from the non-Christian East, the poem’s theme of divine
vengeance has also been read as reflecting badly on contemporary European and
English societies. Suzanne M. Yeager writes that ‘not only do the Jews of the
poem represent Jewish groups who come before and after them, but they also
represent medieval Christians’, arguing that ‘as the Jews of the siege are made
to represent Christendom under threat, they are portrayed as a people with whom
to sympathise and from whom to gain inspiration in the face of adversity’ (Yeager
2004, p. 95). Elisa Narin Van Court suggests this ameliorative impulse can be
found in the close narrative detail of the poem: ‘The Siege of Jerusalem offers
many . . . discursive moments which invite audience and reader into active colloquy
with the poem’s complex representation of Jews’ (Narin Van Court 2004, p. 153).
Randy P. Schiff argues, in a related move, that Scottish, British and ‘hyper-
militaristic’ English tendencies may be covert targets of the poem’s anti-Jewish
attack (Schiff 2008, p. 136).
I would find these readings of Christian and Western self-reflection in the
poem’s treatment of the Jews attractive, if I could agree with them, but I think
they downplay the violently emotional framework and literal spirit in which
Jewishness is conceived and maintained in the narrative, and, in Schiff’s case, the
‘theological’ basis of the poem’s action (Schiff 2008, p. 144). In its early stages, the
Siege involves readers in detailed recollections of the life of Christ and the Passion
as the emotional source – in pity, anger and contempt – of Vespasian’s campaign:
‘Byholdeþ þe heþyng [scorn] and þe harde woundes,

Þe byndyng & þe betyng þat he on body hadde:
Lat neuer þis lawles ledis [people] lauȝ at his harmys
Þat bouȝt [redeemed] vs fram bale [evil] with blod of his herte.
Y quyte-clayme [renounce] þe querels of alle quyk burnes [living men]

And clayme of euereche kyng saue [except] of Crist one [alone],
Þat [Whom] þis peple to pyne [torment] no pite ne hadde:
As preueþ his passioun, whoso þe paas [passage] redeþ.’
(SJ 497–504)
Vespasian’s speech is founded in a particular distribution of emotion. Christians

remember Christ’s sufferings with pity. The Jews have proven themselves un-
worthy of pity because they denied it to Christ in his torment, and laugh at him
still. The process of the Passion therefore still continues, and Christian compassion
requires that Jewish laughter and mockery be repaid. The Jews are considered
to have espoused, once and for all, and in the utmost degree, that wrongful use
of force against a forbidden target which defines the very nature of violence. The
force employed against them in the name of Christ is therefore not to be read as
violence, but as justice, and its effects on the Jews should attract no sympathy.
As Philippa C. Maddern has argued,
‘when the world is viewed through a paradigm in which God has ordained
certain expressions of violence as if they were forces of nature, types of
50 Andrew Lynch
violence performed by actors “in a right relationship with authority” are

legitimized so much that they are “not simply just but justifying”’
(Maddern 1992, pp. 84–87)
All the subsequent carnage of the poem’s first battle and its aftermath, extreme
even by the high standards of this genre, follows the impetus of this emotional
programme. That includes the extensive judicial tortures – flayed alive, drawn
with horses, hanged upside down – of the ‘bishop’ Caiaphas and the Jewish clerics,
which are frankly offered as enjoyable to the Christian reader. In this context, the
sorrow of the Jews watching from the city walls is deprived of effective emotional
agency. Unable to produce a response from their Christian others, their feelings
can only operate reflexively, on themselves:
Þe Iewes walten [threw themselves] ouer þe walles for wo at þat tyme;

Seuen hundred slow hemself for sorow of here clerkes [clergy].
Somme hent hem [took themselves] by þe heere and fram þe hed pulled
And somme doun for deil [grief] and daschen to grounde.
(SJ 713–716)
Their sorrow intensifies the emotional atmosphere, but provides no grounds for
Christian pity. Vespasian makes no immediate response to their grief. He first
orders the bodies of Caiaphas and the Jewish clergy to be cut down and burned
to ashes, and then lets the wind blow the dust towards the citizens watching from
the walls:
‘Þer is doust [powder] for ȝour drynke’, adoun to hem crieþ

And bidde hem bible [drink heartily] of þat broth for þe bischop soule.’
(SJ 723–724)
Vespasian’s delay in making this mocking reply, as much as its parodic content,
models a correct lack of emotional availability to the unfolding situation, refusing
in any way to allow the Jews’ sufferings power to generate a dialogue with their
others. Conversely, the refusal of the Jews, against massive odds, to surrender to
Vespasian is represented as cursed stubbornness rather than courage. One reference
to their brave defence is policed by the immediate comment that they were in the
Devil’s service (SJ 838). Even when surrendering the city at last, the Jews
‘stubbornly’ refuse to acknowledge that their defeat is a vengeance for killing
Christ. They will, it seems, go on making the same blind error and so deserve the
same treatment. Similarly, they refuse to parley with Vespasian and seek ‘mercy’.
This moves him to exemplary anger and another explicit denial of pity:
Þan wroþ as a wode [mad] bore he wendeþ [turns] his bridul:

‘Ȝif ȝe as dogges wol dey þe deuel haue þat recche [cares]!
And or [before] I wende fro þis walle ȝe schul wordes schewe
And efte spakloker speke or Y ȝour speche owene

[And answer more wisely before I acknowledge your speech]’.
(SJ 781–784)
Jewish grief has been left unheeded by the Christian forces. Jewish silence is read
as a further sign of emotional inversion, a refusal to participate in any dialogue,
that frees Christians from caring about what happens to them. If the Jews are
beyond mercy it is because, as in the Gospels, they have themselves chosen to be
so. Since they will not ‘more wisely’ confess their defeat by Christ, the use of force
is mandated, though it can only punish, never convert them. Christian emotions
here are not understood as free agents responding to events as they please, but as
both constitutive of and responsive to a regime, which properly directs when and
where to feel and not to feel. It is made clear that readerly (Christian) sympathy
for the justly punished Jews would, in itself, mean emotional infidelity to Christ.
Under the conditions of this emotional regime the Christian-Jewish ‘colloquy’
that Narin Van Court (2004) speaks of is precisely what could not occur without
fatally compromising the idea of ‘Christian’ and ‘Jewish’ that the poem constructs.
An overriding emotional pattern is in place: when offered mercy Jews refuse it;
their blood is on their own heads. Pity for their sufferings, or any positive
emotional contact, is therefore pointless. If their fate can be read to provide a
cognitive lesson for Christians, that interpretative move still represents no more
than another despoliation of Jerusalem by Rome, allowing Jews sympathy only as
proxy Christians, expressly excluding them from sympathy in their own right.
The poem stages later how young Titus learns this emotional lesson when he
is mistakenly moved to pity for the besieged Jews after hearing of their appalling
sufferings in the siege:
Whan Titus told was þe tale, to trewe God he vouched

Þat he propfred hem pes and grete pite hadde.
Þo praied he Iosophus to preche þe peple to enforme [instruct]

For to saue hemself and þe cite ȝelde [surrender].
Bot Ion forsoke þe sawe so forto wyrche
[But John forsook the counsel to act in that way],
With Symond þat oþer segge [man] þat þe cyte ladde.
(SJ 1155–1160)
The Jews again reject pity. Those who do take up the offer to ask forgiveness for
their sin against Christ are found to have cunningly swallowed their money to
keep it from the Romans, and are disembowelled so it can be recovered, though
without Titus’s permission. The narrative works repeatedly to show young Titus’s
good emotional intentions thwarted by the tricks of the Jews themselves, in ways
that exculpate his final response from being a violence. Finally learning the poem’s
emotional logic of the Christian-Jewish relationship, he concludes by resolving
52 Andrew Lynch
‘Neuer pyte ne pees profre hem more / Ne gome þat he gete may to no grace
taken’ – ‘Never offer them pity or peace any more; nor let any man that is
captured be given any mercy’ (SJ 1179–1180). By the time the Jewish leaders do
ask for peace and offer the keys to the gates of Jerusalem, Titus has already broken
his own ‘gate’ (‘road’) through the wall. There is in effect no Jewish response to
the siege that can either be effective of itself or draw a positive response from their
Christian others. Mutuality of any kind, even in surrender, is consistently shown
as impossible.
In these conditions, if medieval readers did observe a typological likeness in this
poem between Jerusalem and Christendom, Jews and Christians, it was a cognitive
effort in the context of a strategically coordinated series of emotional prompts and
inhibitions that actively disabled any sympathetic potential in that likeness and
made it thoroughly unilateral and aggressive. The poem is theologically framed by
a crude Christian triumphalism, but its core is the literal destruction of an earthly
Jerusalem. In this, I argue, the poem operates beyond David Nirenberg’s persuasive
analysis that Christian texts use the Jew as a cautionary figure in their struggle
to maintain representative contact with transcendent truth, as ‘a warning not to
repeat their error of seeing only the letter of the law, the outer flesh rather than
the inner spirit’ (Nirenberg 2015, p. 13). The Jews of the Siege are stubborn
literalists, but the poem delights in repaying them in kind, and has little or no
interest in sustaining symbolic readings of events. Its retributive logic is deliberately
imitative and complementary, not transcendent. One clear indication of this
literalism is that the voice that cries ‘woe’ at the end of thåe siege does not address
itself at large to ‘the inhabitants of earth and the sea’, as the angel does in
Revelation 40. Instead the voice simply belongs to an unnamed ‘wye [man] on
þe wal’, who laments specifically for ‘Ierusalem þe Iewen toun’ [‘Jerusalem the
Jews’ town], crying ‘Wo to þis worþly wone [wealthy city], and wo to myselue’
(SJ 1229–1236). The relentless materiality of the poem’s register extends to the
detailed description of the looted treasures of the city, and the jeer that Jews who
bought Christ for 30 pieces of silver are now sold at the rate of 30 to a penny.
It may seem absurd to argue that a poem full of the horrific detail of battle,
torture, starvation and even cannibalism is not ‘violent’, but in its own medieval
terms I think that is the case. These effects are not presented as the result of
tyranny or the abuse of power, but of its opposite: a sanctioned military and
religious enterprise which works according to a divine plan of just vengeance. And
yet, there is a deep sense of ‘violence’ in this text, as an effect arising from its
association of the harms suffered by the Jews with their own wrongdoing.
Speaking of later medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary. Miri Rubin writes of
the potent dichotomy between this figure of utmost purity and nurture
and the construction of utmost perversity and pollution in the late medieval
Jew, the Jew of conspiracy and desecration, the Jew of treason and blasphemy.
(Rubin 2009, p. 13)
We see that divisive process at work in The Siege of Jerusalem, but mainly centred
around the figure of Christ rather than Mary. Since the Jews killed Christ, they
are held to blame for their own sufferings, and the more they suffer the more
they are to blame, because the more wrongful their suffering proves them to be.
In this emotional-spiritual context of medieval piety, only the sufferings of Christ
deserve pity, and since in later medieval religious tradition pity for Christ was
largely inseparable from the imagination of his wounded body, it is fitting that the
sufferings of the Jews should also be bodily, mandated by an alternate proper
judicial process in place of the injustice done to Christ in his Passion. To the true
Christian, pity for Christ should be endless and inexhaustible; its corollary, a lack
of pity for the Jews, should be likewise. The specially perverse, arrogant and
abusive quality of medieval ‘violence’ belongs to them, and is embodied in them,
because they are to be understood as the originating and continuing violent agents:
‘In a stunning historical inversion . . . [the] replayed scene of violence justifies the
real and imagined persecution of medieval Jews’ (Crocker 2017, p. 85; Bale 2010,
p. 57). It is the poetic realisation of that logic, I think, that gives the description
of the Jews’ appalling sufferings, for all their horrors, an aura of blank detachment
and distance that makes them peculiarly disturbing to a modern reader. As a
shocking effect of the poetry’s emotional unavailability to these sufferings, they
falsely appear monumental, mysteriously naturalised as part of the condition of
Jewishness rather than what they are, the work of Christians.
In conclusion, and thinking especially of the two main texts analysed here, I
suggest that although medieval ‘violence’ is notionally a category established on
ethical grounds, assessing permissible or wrongful uses of physical force, the first
question to ask about an instance of extreme force in a medieval text is not
whether it is justified or condemned on ethical grounds, as if one were discussing
a case in abstraction, or even by ‘by the way [it] derive[s] its meaning from larger
systems of honor’ (Di Marco 2000, pp. 29–30). What matters most is what
kind and what degree of emotional engagement its written form is designed to
display and to attract in situ. ‘Violence’ and its opposite, ‘just force’, are poetic
achievements rather than consistent cognitive categories. ‘Violent’ actions include
both physical and psychological motions; narration of them connects body and
mind, endowing actions with motivations and ethical connections, while also
indicating an appropriate emotional reaction to them, apparently tying together
action and evaluation in a probative sequence. Yet the operations and outcomes
of that process are elusive, because suggestions of ‘violence’ are neither governed
by a single value system – they signify ‘wrongful’ or ‘too much’ or ‘badly motivated’
in a wide variety of ways – nor necessarily made explicit in abstract terms. The
meaning and evaluation of extreme bodily force in later medieval English literature
has less to do with the general nature of the force involved than with its poetic
expression, with the links between aesthetics, ethics and action formed in texts,
which are, as Sarah McNamer puts it, ‘affective scripts in the history of emotion’,
that ‘seek to generate emotional experience’ (McNamer 2015, p. 1436). In this
54 Andrew Lynch
process, the literary generation of emotion in different generations of readers may

qualify, or even oppose, responses to violence that might be reached by other
criteria. In the long run, there are identifiable generic tendencies, but no consistent
definition: what is ‘violent’ in medieval literature and what ‘violence’ means there
will always remain a process of emotional affiliation for readers.
Notes
1 See Middle English Dictionary, violent, adj, 1. (a) ‘Of an action, behavior, etc.: displaying
physical force exercised injuriously, coercively, etc., brutally or violently performed’.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED51211
2 See, for example, the flaying alive of Godard in Havelok the Dane.
3 All references to the Alliterative Morte Arthure are to Benson, L. D. and Forster, E. E.
(eds) 1994, King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative
Morte Arthure, Medieval Institute Publications, Kalamazoo MI, designated as AMA with
line numbers. Glosses and translations are the author’s.
4 They win back the Crown of Thorns, sacred lance and the nails and the Holy Cross,
respectively.
5 Hanna, R. & Lawton, D. (eds) 2003, The Siege of Jerusalem, EETS o.s. 320, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, ll. 295–300. All subsequent quotation from the poem is from
this edition, as SJ with line numbers. Translations and glosses are the author’s.
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4
THE ARMAGNAC–
BURGUNDIAN FEUD AND
THE LANGUAGES OF ANGER
Tracy Adams
On 25 March 1410, a herald named Jacquemart David received payment from the
Hôtel de Ville of Amiens, in the Burgundian territories, for delivering a message
on behalf of the Prince d’Amour of Paris announcing a ‘feste et assemblee’ of the
‘Cour amoureuse’ to be held on 15 April, the feast of the Annunciation (Piaget
1902, p. 603). That the Amiénois would be informed of a love-poetry festival is
not surprising: home of the Confraternity of the Puys of Our Lady of Amiens,
founded in 1389, Amiens boasted many poets (Lavéant 2013). The planned date
for the event, however, gives pause, for the Orleanist (or Armagnac)-Burgundian
feud, smouldering for several years, was on the brink of reigniting into the civil
war that would lead to the Treaty of Troyes and the occupation of France by the
English.1 Since December 1409, Jean Duke of Burgundy, who controlled Paris,
and his cousin, the insane king, had been amassing troops near the city (Lehoux
1966–1968, vol. 3, p. 160, n. 6). In a lit de justice of 31 December 1409, Jean had
taken over guardianship of the dauphin, and, as the chronicler Monstrelet notes,
New Year’s Day found him out working the crowds, that is, distributing large
numbers of étrennes or presents in the form of jewelled images of his symbol, the
rabot or carpenter’s plane (Lehoux 1966–1968, vol. 2, pp. 57–58). Jean had recently
excluded his uncles the Dukes of Berry and Bourbon from government. Furious,
they had abruptly departed Paris sometime in February or March (Lehoux
1966–1968, vol. 3, p. 164, n. 1). In a letter dated 9 March 1410, an Italian mer-
chant residing in Paris noted that war would have broken out already if not for
the shortage of funds on both sides (Lehoux 1966–1968, vol. 3, p. 164, n. 2). On
15 April the Orleanists would form the League of Gien and begin to plan their
march on Paris. Thus it seems an odd time for members of the Cour amoureuse
– of which Jean was one of the 24 conservateurs – to have been thinking about
love poetry.
58 Tracy Adams
Or perhaps not. In this chapter I examine how different chroniclers and court
writers mediated the outrage that finally led the Orleanist and Burgundian factions
to armed conflict, especially from the formation of the League of Gien to the 1419
assassination of Jean of Burgundy. In this context, I examine the Cour amoureuse
as one Burgundian theatre for defining relationships and enacting the emotional
injuries that motivated its leaders to take up arms (Bozzolo & Loyau 1982–1992;
Bozzolo & Ornato 1986). In the first section I consider how the leaders of both
factions competed for the moral high ground by performing what we might think
of as aristocratic anger in a number of different settings. Contemporary writers
offer vivid images of the faction leaders righteously proclaiming their duty to take
up arms to save the king. The founding document of the Cour amoureuse, its
charter, re-draws the royal hierarchy to favour the Burgundians, an insult to the
Orleanists that could only arouse their anger, a legitimate, even obligatory, response
to an insult. Anger was ‘a deeply social passion’, to use the words of Daniel M.
Gross (2007, p. 2), ‘an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge
for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards what concerns
oneself or towards what concerns one’s friends’. Indeed, enacting aristocratic anger
in answer to injury was central to honour. To Queen Isabeau’s request that he
come to the negotiating table, Jean of Burgundy acknowledges that the king has
assigned the queen the weighty task of appeasing the kingdom’s divisions and
assures her that he has always worked for the service and honour of her and the
king, but refuses her because of the need to guard his own honour (‘necessité de
garder [s]on honneur’) (Juvénal des Ursins 1836, p. 466). Jean had just received a
letter of challenge from the Orleans sons accusing him of treacherously murdering
their father, and concern for his honour led him to continue cultivating anger
rather than peace.
And yet, even though the war narrative of aristocratic anger clearly dominates
in contemporary chronicles, it is frequently unsettled by traces of popular fury that
challenge the feud leaders’ righteousness, offering a contestatory, if disjointed,
narrative running parallel to the chivalric one. In the second section of this
chapter, I suggest that despite the chroniclers’ apparent consensus that the ‘people’
were unreasoning, beast-like creatures, easily manipulated by cynical feud leaders
into revolt, their anger was considered and complex. Slavoj Žižek’s (2008, p. 1)
distinction between subjective (agential, overt and spectacular) and objective
violence (symbolic or systemic, and hidden from view), which has been widely
drawn on in recent war scholarship, is a useful analytical tool for examining how
popular anger related to the Orleanist-Burgundian feud.2 Indeed, when we piece
together the mentions of furious citizens that accompany accounts of the feud
leaders’ actions, we see that such outbursts of subjective violence respond to
economic scarcity, itself to a large degree the result of the ‘objectively violent’
Valois ideology of kingship that, among other things, allowed an insane monarch
to remain in power (Heckmann 2002; Autrand 1995, 1994, pp. 523–528, 661–668;
Guenée 1988). Had the mad king simply left office and a permanent regent taken
over until the dauphin came of age, much of the turbulence of the first decades of
The languages of anger 59
the fifteenth century would have been avoided. Using Žižek’s terms, we can say
that the subjective violence incited by the feud leaders as they fought for control of
the king and dauphin deflected attention from the kingdom’s ubiquitous systemic,
or objective, violence, which worked by convincing subjects that the king ruled by
the grace of God and therefore could not be removed. The relationship between
popular anger and the feud, then, is complicated. The French people were good
subjects (‘of all the kingdoms and countries in the world, the people of France has
the most natural and best love and obedience for their Prince,’ as Christine de Pizan
[1994, p. 93] wrote). But by remaining loyal to the king, they perpetuated their
own misery.
Aristocratic Anger and the Orleanist-Burgundian Feud

The important events of the Orleanist-Burgundian conflict are well-known. Shortly
after the first episode in 1392 of the intermittent mental illness that would
permanently disable Charles VI, the king appointed his brother Louis (not yet the
Duke of Orleans) to rule when he could not. The brother of the living king
outranked everyone but the king’s sons in the carefully ordered system of royal
rank that had solidified during the course of the reign of Charles VI’s father,
Charles V (Guénee 1988). Although during Charles V’s early reign his right to the
throne had been challenged because of uncertainties in succession dating back to
Philip VI or even Philip V, the system had worked during the middle and later
years of the reign, supported by a politics of family love, manifested through royal
ordinances, iconography and communications, oral and written, among members
of the royal family. However, the system broke down with the onset of Charles
VI’s madness, because the king and Louis’s uncle, Philip of Burgundy, tried to seize
power for himself (Adams 2014, pp. 30–38). This power grab, in turn, triggered
the factionalism that Jean of Burgundy so devastatingly intensified by having Louis
of Orleans murdered in 1407 and that the dauphin, later Charles VII, futilely tried
to end by ordering the slaying of Jean of Burgundy. Popular outrage against the
terrible burden to the kingdom caused by the feud made little impression on
the leaders, buoyed by their own performances of aristocratic anger in response to
injuries from their rival throughout the decades of strife.
Early on, the warring members of the royal family managed their rivalry by
means of symbolic displays of anger and insult. The Cour amoureuse, far from a
pleasant diversion, had been founded by Philip of Burgundy and Queen Isabeau
in January 1400 for the purpose – I suggest – of insulting Louis of Orleans, whose
reputation for intelligent, generous speech would have been one more target for
Philip’s jealousy.3 Poetry was central to courtly identity, reinforcing seigneurial
authority. Great lords and knights, like Othon de Grandson, the Marshal Boucicaut
and Louis of Orleans, were renowned not only for their martial skills but for their
ability to compose verse, whether or not they in fact wrote the poetry attributed
to them (Straub 1961; Kosta-Théfaine 2007; Piaget 1941; Jean le Sénéchal 1909,
pp. liv–v, 119–120). In addition, recent studies emphasise the extent to which
60 Tracy Adams
poets competed with each other for ‘social capital’ at court (Taylor 2007; Coldiron
2000; Armstrong 2000). Urban confraternities also hosted poetry competitions to
augment the prestige of their cities. Amiens, as we have seen, along with Arras,
Caen, Dieppe, Rouen, Valenciennes and Beauvais had long traditions of con-
fraternities created to host literary puys, or lyric poetic competitions, often dedicated
to the Virgin Mary (Reid 2006, pp. 152–153). Creating ‘a form of spiritual
kinship’ and ‘extending the trust that ideally existed between family members to
a social group that was not blood related’, confraternities helped to manage civil
strife by uniting their members around various causes (Reid 2006, p. 151). In
this they were like military orders: Louis of Bourbon’s Ordre de l’Escu d’or, founded
in 1368, Louis of Orleans’s Ordre du Porc-épic, founded in 1394 and Boucicaut’s
Ordre de la dame blanche à l’écu vert, founded 1399. The associations also sought to
defuse disruptive rivalries by re-directing them towards group goals (Boulton
1987, pp. 1–26).
As for the Cour amoureuse, through its charter Philip redrew the system of
royal rank to which I have just referred to his own advantage, placing himself
beside the king as the chief connoisseur of love poetry in the kingdom. The
charter of the Cour amoureuse explains that the institution was to sponsor love
poetry competitions and honour women. More importantly, however, I am
proposing, it was also intended to injure Louis’s honour. According to the charter,
Philip of Burgundy was one of three grands conservateurs of the court, along with
the king and the king’s maternal uncle Louis of Bourbon (Bozzolo & Loyau 1982–
1992, vol. 1, p. 37). Queen Isabeau’s brother, Louis Duke of Bavaria and Philip’s
son, Jean (later Duke of Burgundy) are ranked before Louis in the list of 11
conservateurs. Furthermore, the charter specifies that on the chimney in his chamber
the Duke of Burgundy’s arms will hang next to those of the king’s, with the Duke
of Bourbon’s to the left: the arms of the Duke of Orleans are not mentioned
(Bozzolo & Loyau 1982–1992, vol. 1, p. 39).
If Louis read the charter, he apparently did not dignify the provocation with
an answer. Regent not only by virtue of his proximity of relation to the king but
also through the king’s love and confidence, he did not concern himself with
parrying insults or securing his popularity. Rather, he concentrated, as Françoise
Autrand writes, on ‘building an efficient and powerful state. . . .’ (Autrand 2009,
pp. 271–273). However, Christine de Pizan defends him against the aggression
done him by the Cour amoureuse by re-asserting his loyalty and veneration of
women in the Dit de la rose, which she presented to him in February 1402. This
narrative poem dramatises the delivery of a message from the god of love by the
goddess, Loyalty, to a group of ‘noble folk’, ‘rich in honor, handsome, and well-
bred’, gathered at the hotel of ‘that noble lord’, the Duke of Orleans, for a poetry
contest:
Si fut voir qu’a Paris advint,

Present nobles gens plus de vint,
Joyeux et liez et senz esmois,
L’an quatre cens et un, ou mois

De janvier, plus de la moittié
Ains la date de ce dittié,
Du mois passé, quant ceste chose
Advint en une maison close. . . .
Notables sont et renommez,

Des plus prisiez et miexul amez
Du tres noble duc d’Orlïens,
Qui Dieu gart de tous maulx lïens. . . .
La n’ot parlé a ce mangier

Fors de courtoisie et d’onnour,
Senz diffamer grant ne menour,
Et de beaulx livres et de dis,
Et de balades plus de dix.
Qui mieulx mieulx chascun devisoit,
Ou d’amours qui s’en avisoit,
Ou de demandes gracïeuses.
(Fenster & Erler 1990, p. 92, ll. 25–32; p. 94, ll. 39–42, 68–75)
This contest and the feast in which the guests partake reflect the contests laid out
in the charter of the Cour amoureuse. Loyalty offers the crowd the opportunity
to pledge to treat ladies well: to keep each lady’s reputation pure. The poem’s
narrator, presumably Christine, is later awakened from her sleep in that same hotel
by a voice speaking from a brilliant cloud. The voice warns at length against
the dangers of slanderers (both male and female), who are more evil (‘plus male’)
and dangerous (‘plus nuysant’) than war-like people (‘gent bataillereuse’) (Fenster
& Erler 1990, p. 115, ll. 447–449). The voice then orders Christine to leave the
hotel, taking with her a letter, a bull, from the God of Love, to spread the news
in ‘every land/ Where noble people war against/ the ladies’ (Fenster & Erler 1990,
p. 117, ll. 521–522).
To put these virtual theatres for performing rivalry into their larger context,
the ducal tension is mentioned explicitly for the first time by chroniclers during
these same years. The monk of St. Denis, Michel Pintoin, official chronicler for
the kings of France, describes the anger between Louis and his uncles, Philip and
Jean of Berry, as the result of a lack of proper respect for rank. As I noted above,
Louis, as the king’s brother, preceded his uncles in rank. However, the uncles
disputed this, pointing to their nephew’s youth. According to the monk, the royal
uncles were angry (‘indignabantur’) because Louis refused to support their call for
the withdrawal of obedience from the Avignon pope Benedict XIII. But, more
importantly, adds Pintoin, another hidden tension existed between them (‘latebat
et alius indignacionis fomes inter eos’) (Pintoin 1994, vol. 3, p. 12). Louis, being
closest to the king, monopolised power: he was ‘impaciens consortis’, that is,
62 Tracy Adams
‘intolerant regarding shared heritage’, in the eyes of the royal uncles, who felt their
own honour diminished by his prominence (Pintoin 1994, vol. 3, p. 12).
Philip died in 1404, but the rivalry continued, with his son the new Duke of
Burgundy, Jean, less easily satisfied than his father had been with ‘staging’ anger
in response to what he understood as the unjustified preeminence of his cousin at
his own expense. Jean turned to physical violence to answer as the perceived
threat of armed conflict grew, and, finally, the assassination of Louis of Orleans at
his order in 1407 set the stage for a cycle of subjective violence that would be
unleashed as soon as Louis’s sons reached an age to avenge their father’s death.
Too young at first to resist, the new duke, Charles, and his brothers were forced
to participate in the Peace of Chartres of 9 March 1409, which was designed to
appease their anger and reconcile them with the unrepentant Jean. The elaborately
orchestrated peace ritual began with Charles and his brother, Philip Count of
Vertus, entering the cathedral with the king, queen and the dauphin, while the
other princes and took their places on a dais constructed for the occasion
(Monstrelet 1857–1862, vol. 1, pp. 397–402). The Duke of Burgundy and his
advocate entered through the front of the cathedral, where armed guards kept
watch. As they approached the assembly at the front of the cathedral, all but the
king, queen and dauphin rose. Kneeling before the king, the Duke of Burgundy’s
advocate proclaimed: ‘Look, Sire, here is the Duke of Burgundy, your cousin and
servant, who comes before you because you are angry (‘indigné’) about the act
that he committed and had committed upon the person of Louis of Orleans, your
brother, for the good of the kingdom, as he is ready to explain to you’ (Monstrelet
1857–1862, vol. 1, p. 398). Jean then added, ‘Sire, I pray you’. At this, the Duke
of Berry rose and knelt before queen, speaking to her and the dauphin in a low
voice, before kneeling before the king to ask that he favour this request (Monstrelet
1857–1862, vol. 1, p. 399). The king responded affirmatively. The Duke of
Burgundy and his advocate then approached the Orleans sons, who were crying
visibly (Monstrelet 1857–1862, vol. 1, p. 399).4 The ritual was repeated, and the
boys responded that they would remove rancour (‘malevolence’) from their hearts,
because the king ordered them to do so.
The king then took control of the dukes’ anger, so to speak, ordering them to
be good friends henceforth and forbidding that they have or show hatred (‘n’aiez
à eulx, ne monstrez quelconque hayne’) towards any person associated with the
other, except for the Duke of Orleans’ actual assassins, who were in any case
banished forever (Monstrelet 1857–1862, vol. 1, p. 400). But the king’s attempt
to manage the new duke’s outrage by prohibiting its display and deflecting it
towards the men who had physically carried out the murder was destined to fail.
According to Monstrelet, when the ceremony was over, the Duke of Burgundy,
very happy about the peace thus restored (‘très joieux de icelle paix ainsi faicte’),
took his leave and rode off to dinner. But not everyone was so happy. Monstrelet
notes that many of the lords left behind were greatly discontented, murmuring
that from then on murder would be an option, because there was no longer any
need to make reparation (Monstrelet 1857–1862, vol. 1, p. 400–401).
And young Charles’ humiliation at being denied satisfaction for the injury to his
family was extreme, and, in keeping with the aristocratic expectation of righteous
fury as the proper response to such an insult, his anger was beyond measure. As
Bernard Guenée has observed, the boy’s wrath might have been appeased had Jean
only repented of the assassination and made reparations rather than continuing to
justify himself (Guenée 1992, 186). The process for reestablishing peace required
an acknowledgement of fault. The perpetrator was then expected to leave the
country, letting his relatives negotiate with the relatives of the victim to agree on
a just compensation. Then the king would issue a pardon. Violence during the
period was widespread, but hostility generally did not subsist, with wrongs most
often settled through negotiation (Halsall 1998).
Although Jean’s refusal to comport himself according to noble custom – a
massive transgression – infuriated the Orleans sons, they had no means of asserting
themselves until their uncles the Dukes of Berry and Bourbon fell out with Jean,
as we have seen, and drew Charles and his brothers into the League of Gien.
Solemnised on 15 April 1410, the League of Gien included, in addition to these
allies, Bernard Count of Armagnac, the king’s lieutenant-general for Languedoc,
by whose name the party would then be known. On the day that the league was
formed, Charles contracted to marry the Count of Armagnac’s daughter, Bonne
(Famiglietti 1986, pp. 88–89). On learning of the league, Jean went on the
defensive, summoning his men-at-arms to Paris. The Duke of Berry and his allies
sent justificatory letters to the king and the cities of the realm, articulating the cause
of anger for their audiences. Their letter to the city of Amiens informs the citizens
that they had recently written to the king and then repeats the contents of that
letter. The allies express their anger as a measured and divinely-ordained response
to Jean’s illegitimate seizure of power. We will not rest, they inform the king (and
the citizens of Amiens), until we see
you restored and returned to honour and obedience of your royal majesty,
and the authority and power of your dominion. And we are constrained,
held, and obliged, greatly respected sovereign lord, to do this as much for
the reasons cited as for fear, honor, and reverence of our Creator, from
whom your birth and dominion proceed and also to satisfy justice and you,
who are sovereign king on earth and our only lord, to whom for this reason
and also because of our blood-ties we are entirely obligated. In truth, greatly
respected sovereign lord, there is nothing in the world that we fear more
than to offend and anger God, and, consequently, injure our honour, by
letting these things take place, hidden from view.
(Monstrelet 1857–1862, vol. 2, p. 85)
The letter, however, writes the chronicler Monstrelet, left the king and his council,
as well as the Amienois, unmoved, for they all remained loyal to the Duke of
Burgundy (Monstrelet, 1857–1862, vol. 2, p. 86). Therefore in August 1410
the Armagnacs defiantly marched on Paris to deliver the king and the dauphin
64 Tracy Adams
from Jean. Summoned to mediate between the factions, Queen Isabeau met with
the dukes at Marcoussis (Monstrelet 1857–1862, vol. 2, pp. 91–92). Hostilities
were temporarily avoided when Jean agreed to negotiate, and on 2 November the
peace of Bicêtre was signed. The faction leaders, including Jean, agreed to leave
Paris and appoint a new set of counselors for the royal family.
However, peace did not last. The Duke of Berry was satisfied for the mo-
ment, having reasserted his authority. As Françoise Lehoux (1966–1968, vol. 3,
pp. 205–206) explains, his interests were personal; he had no interest in avenging
the death of his nephew. But the injury to the honour of Charles and his brothers
remained. Monstrelet writes that
at the beginning of the year, the Duke of Orleans, not happy that the king’s
guardians, that is, those in league with the Duke of Burgundy, had greater
access to the king than anyone else, nor that every day the men who had
been with his father [Louis of Orleans] and were now with him were further
distanced from their office, sent ambassadors to remonstrate to the king
about these problems and also to demand that the killers who had murdered
his father be brought to justice. . . .
(Monstrelet 1857–1862, vol. 2, p. 115)
The Orleans sons issued a formal challenge to Jean in July 1411, carefully formu-
lating the relationships that justified their anger:
Charles, Duke of Orleans and Valois, count of Blois and Beaumont, seigneur
of Coucy, Philip, count of Vertus, and Jean, Count of Angoulême, to you,
Jean, who call yourself Duke of Burgundy. For the horrendous murder
treasonously committed by you, the ambush set by the hired murderers
upon the person of our greatly respected lord and father, Monseigneur
Louis, Duke of Orleans, only brother of Monseigneur the king, our sovereign
lord and yours . . . and for the great betrayals, disloyalty, dishonour and evils
that you perpetrated against our sovereign lord the king and against us in
many ways, we inform you that from this hour on, we will injure you with
all our power and with all means that we can muster; against you and your
disloyalty and betrayal we call God and reason to our aid. . . .
(Monstrelet 1857–1862, vol. 2, pp. 152–153)
Jean replied on 13 August, justifying the murder of the Duke of Orleans by

describing the late Duke of Orleans as so abusive of the mad king that Jean had
acted rightly in having him killed:
Charles, who call yourself Duke of Orleans and you Philip who call yourself
Count of Vertus, and you, Jean, who call yourself Count of Angoulême,
who have recently written us letters of challenge, you should know, and we
want everyone to know, that to foil the dreadful and evil betrayals and
plotted ambushes treacherously carried out against Monseigneur the king,
our greatly respected and sovereign lord and yours, and against his noble
offspring, by the late Louis, your father, in several diverse ways, and to keep
the false and disloyal traitor, your father, from achieving the detestable goal
that he intended against your greatly respected and sovereign lord and his,
and also against [the king’s] offspring, so falsely and infamously that no
decent man could let [Louis] live, we, who are cousin of my said lord . . .
had assassinated, as we were obligated to do, this false and disloyal traitor.
And in this way we please God. . . .
(Monstrelet 1857–1862, vol. 2, p. 153)
With these public declarations of enmity, the war had officially begun. Jean could
not back down after such a challenge, even though the queen begged him to come
to the table, as we have seen. The decade from 1410–1419, as described by
contemporary observers, was marked by fulsome expressions of aristocratic anger
as the feud continued, halted occasionally by a peace treaty, but always reigniting
when one of the other of the parties violated the agreement. Charles of Orleans
was taken prisoner by the English at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, bringing an
end to his physical participation in the feud, which continued without him. Even
the assassination of Jean of Burgundy at the hands of the dauphin’s men on
Montereau Bridge in September 1419, did not put an end to the feud, which
continued without either of the two original leaders.
To return for the last time to the Cour amoureuse, in their two-volume study
of the institution, Carla Bozzolo and Hélène Loyau gather information from the
six manuscripts in which documents related to the institution are collected to offer
a complete list of the approximately 950 participants from 1400 to 1440.5 The
members were preponderantly partisans of the Dukes of Burgundy, with a large
influx of new members entering the ranks when Philip the Good succeeded his
father, Jean, after his assassination by followers of the dauphin, Charles, later
Charles VII (Bozzolo & Loyau 1982–1992, vol. 1, p. 18). It has never been clear
to what extent the Cour amoureuse existed more on paper than in performance,
although some evidence, including the document with which I began this chapter,
suggests that it met at least occasionally. But whatever it was, the institution was
carefully maintained by the Burgundians over a long period of time. In a sense,
then, whether or not poetic competitions took place is irrelevant. The Burgundians
obviously felt keeping up the Cour amoureuse to have been of symbolic importance
in reinforcing group solidarity and creating and reiterating bonds that would
motivate members to come to the aid of the Burgundian faction. Convening the
Cour amoureuse just as the first hostilities between the Orleanists and Burgundians
threatened to break out now makes perfect sense. The Burgundian institution
served not only to unite the faction members around a common goal but also to
assure them that its recourse to arms to express their anger was honourable.
66 Tracy Adams
Popular outrage
The stirring words of righteous anger and calls for vengeance are the stuff of
chivalric adventure. In pronouncing their anger publicly, the dukes justified
summoning their men to arms and amassing resources, often through taxing those
least likely to profit from conflict to support their personal quarrel. That their men
would respond to their calls for support was a given (or at least it is presented
in such in contemporary writing with failures to do so condemned), and the feud
is regarded through the lens of chivalry in most contemporary writing, until the
1420s. Such was the normal course of life among the aristocracy, which assumed
armed conflict to be an ancient right, central to noble identity.
In contrast, the feud brought the people – referred to as ‘gens’, ‘peuple’,
‘habitans’, ‘ignobili’, ‘cives’, ‘populi minori’, ‘oppidani’, descriptions that did not
adequately distinguish among very real differences among the non-nobles – only
grief without the compensatory accrual of honour that was central to the aristocratic
ethos. And yet, the rare contemporary descriptions of popular anger in the face of
the hardship caused by war cast the emotion as unbridled, frenzied and destructive.
But close attention to these descriptions suggests that although the chroniclers
assume the entire kingdom to be divided between Armagnac and Burgundian, the
people had their own agenda, one that corresponded to the objective of neither
of the factions (which was, in each case, to control the king and government of
the kingdom). In what follows, I trace the relationship between what contemporary
writers describe as the frenzied wrath of the people and the very different type of
anger between the dukes that underwrote the strife. I focus on two examples to
make the point that descriptions of popular anger disrupt the narrative of chivalry
throughout the chroniclers’ narratives of the years between the formation of the
League of Gien and the death of Jean of Burgundy.
But first, I offer some examples to suggest that the noble/non-noble divide was
more profound than that between Armaganc and Burgundian, to set the stage for
examining these two accounts of popular outrage. By the summer of 1412 the
king had cast his lot with the Burgundians and set out with Jean of Burgundy and
their combined armies to defeat the Armagnacs (Schnerb 1988, pp. 119–122;
Famiglietti 1986, pp. 104–110). After crossing into Berry, they sent an order to
the castle of Fontenay in the care of Captain Robert of Fontenay, whom the
Monk of St. Denis describes as ‘eminent arms bearer’ (‘insignis armiger’, ‘écuyer’),
to surrender the castle to the king. Robert, man of the Duke of Berry, humbly
but firmly declined to let the king enter as long as he and his government were
under the control of Jean of Burgundy, in words so chivalrous that Pintoin records
them (1994, vol. 4, p. 642). Indignant at hearing himself so slighted, Jean ordered
a siege of the castle (Pintoin 1994, vol. 4, p. 642). But when the townspeople saw
the army advancing they were terrified, and, excluded from their captain’s chivalric
world, they forced Robert of Fontenay to eat his brave words by sending him to
the king with the keys to the castle. The second episode occurred in early August,
in Orleans-held Dreux in the region of Beauce, which was torn between the
Armagnacs and Burgundians. The incident was too slight to retain chroniclers’
attention, but the anonymous Bourgeois of Paris’s description is suggestive, and
a comparison between this account and Pintoin’s is instructive (Pintoin 1994,
vol. 4, pp. 672–676; Bourgeois de Paris 1990, pp. 53–54). Pintoin mentions
Dreux in passing, just after proclaiming that he will now turn his attention from
feats of arms (‘militares conciones’) to the pursuit of the enemy. The Count of
Saint-Paul, constable of France, could not take Dreux, but quickly regrouped and
ambushed the Armagnac army. In the subsequent disarray, the royal army took
Dreux. The Bourgeois, however, complicates the picture, showing the commander
of the royal town militias (‘les communes’) betraying the townspeople to the
Armagnacs for money. The Armagnacs were stronger in the Beauce, writes
the Bourgeois, but the people, heavily burdened by the armies, did not know
whom to obey when the militias entered the region. When the militias arrived in
Dreux, they found the townspeople rebellious (supporting the Armagnacs) and
therefore killed many and laid siege. But just when the citizens of Dreux could
no longer hold out, the leader of the militias accepted money from some of the
besieged Armagnacs to abruptly desert the town. The Armagnacs would have slain
the remaining militia members had they not departed immediately for Paris.
Whom can one trust, the Bourgeois wonders indignantly. Exhausted by the
summer heat and prodded by the dauphin, the factions re-established peace at
Auxerre on 22 August (Famiglietti 1986, pp. 106–110).
Let us now consider two examples of chronicle entries in which the fury of
the crowds overwhelms the chroniclers’ ability to coherently order the mayhem
within a chivalric narrative. Describing the state of the kingdom in spring, 1417,
when the second dauphin had just died leaving only the youngest royal son,
Charles, who was being raised in the Armagnac House of Anjou, Pintoin (1994,
vol. 6, p. 62) writes that with ‘the enemy of humankind, instigator of mortal
discord, prodding. . .the French, noble and non-noble, motivated by an implacable
hatred, fought among themselves . . . .’. The villages and towns were divided into
Armagnac and Burgundian with the people referring to each other as the most
terrible traitors (‘proditores pessimos’) (1994, vol. 6, p. 64). Pintoin (1994, vol. 6,
p. 74) struggles to maintain the distinction between aristocratic and plebeian anger,
but falters: knights and squires claiming to be in the service of one of the dukes
were devastating the land; the king’s men did not even try to stop the marauding
bands. In the midst of ‘stormy waves’ (‘undas procellosas’) of the princes’ dissension
. . . the minds of the people ‘swelled’ (‘fluctuarent’) with ‘varied motions’ (‘motibus
variis’) at the news of fresh hostilities. The dreadful situation, pronounces Pintoin
(1994, vol. 6, p. 90), was the fault of the great lords who no longer drew their
swords to chastise the iniquitous, but only to strike against each other. To make
things worse, the English, having defeated the French at Agincourt in 1415,
continued their advance into the kingdom.
And yet, in outraged response to an order from the constable of France,
Bernard of Armagnac, to let the king’s soldiers enter Rouen to defend the town
68 Tracy Adams
against the impending English attack, the townspeople, writes Pintoin (1994,
vol. 6, p. 92), the ‘minoris populi’, dashed through the streets as if in a ‘crazed
attack’ (‘vesano impetus’), shrieking not to obey the order. They did not want the
alien robbers (‘alienigenas predones’) in their city. The townspeople then arrogated
to themselves the guard of the town, taking the keys from the highly-placed
burgers, and slew the king’s bailli. The dauphin was dispatched to Rouen to calm
the turbulence, but was refused entry unless he came unaccompanied by foreign
troops (Pintoin 1994, vol. 6, p. 94). Peace was achieved only after the dauphin
promised amnesty for all except those who had attacked the king’s men (Pintoin
1994, vol. 6, p. 96).
Although Pintoin describes the behaviour of the Rouennais as frenzied and
irrational, their reaction is understandable to anyone who has been reading the
chronicle: having been harassed for several years by pillaging soldiers, they were
unwilling to let yet more of the same into the town enclosure, especially the
Gascon soldiers of Bernard of Armagnac who were especially feared for their
rapaciousness, according to contemporary chroniclers. For the Rouennais, the
men sent to protect them were at least as frightening as their ‘enemies’, Jean of
Burgundy and the English, against whom they were to be protected.
Another example of chronicler dismay at the rioting crowds is the Bourgeois’
attempt to depict the wild rush of the Burgundian Parisians to murder Armagnac
Parisians when the Burgundians infiltrated Armagnac-held Paris in May 1418. The
Burgundian Parisians massacred thousands, among them the Count of Armagnac,
in a spree so furious that the Bourgeois’s words failed him. He used the language
of allegory to describe the horrors he observed. All social distinctions vanished, an
effect he tries to capture in his description: ‘Then arose the goddess of Discord,
who was in the Tower of Ill-Counsel, and awakened Ire the insane (‘ire la
forcenée’) and Covetousness and Rage (‘enragerie’) and Vengeance, and took
arms in all manner and kicked out Raison, Justice, Memory, God, and Moderation’
(Bourgeois de Paris 1990, p. 15).
Despite the impression of utter chaos conveyed by the Bourgeois, Michael
Sizer has convincingly argued that the crowd’s violence was not disordered but
tactical. The Burgundians had suffered under Armagnac rule, and, in seeking
their revenge, they aimed their fury at the persons and institutions that had caused
them the most misery (Sizer 2007, pp. 766–768). As far as the chroniclers were
concerned, however, the anger was completely unreasoned and violent, a sort of
insanity that spread like an infection, unleashed by announcements made by the
princes of the blood. Such a conception of anger evokes Augustine, for example,
in the City of God 14.19, where he describes ira as moving the body: the initial
movement is unavoidable, although, like lust, it can be regulated through the
mind and reason (‘mente atque ratione’) (Knuuttila 2003, pp. 53–54). Humans
share this type of emotions with animals; descriptions of the frenzied townspeople
betray the chroniclers’ perception that they were beasts. The anger of the towns-
people, described as generalised fury, is a different emotion from the one that
Aristotle describes and the one that Pintoin assumes to be behind the ducal enmity.
Conclusion
The social construction of anger as appropriate response to injury among the
privileged classes and illegitimate fury among the less fortunate remains obvious
today in media reports about urban unrest. As I write this chapter, rioting has
broken out in Baltimore in the United States in response to yet one more police
killing of a young black man. We read that:
[r]ioters plunged part of Baltimore into chaos Monday, torching a pharmacy,

setting police cars ablaze and throwing bricks at officers hours after thousands
mourned the man who died from a severe spinal injury he suffered in police
custody. . . . Earlier Monday, the smell of burned rubber wafted in the air
in one neighborhood where youths were looting a liquor store. Police stood
still nearby as people drank looted alcohol. Glass and trash littered the streets,
and other small fires were scattered about. One person from a church tried
to shout something from a megaphone as two cars burned.
(Darcy 2015)
Numerous news outlets have compared such reports to descriptions that depict
rioting by white students as justified in the wake of the firing of Joe Paterno,
former coach of the Penn State Lions, who supported his assistant coach Jerry
Sandusky as he sexually molested boys.
After top Penn State officials announced that they had fired Joe Paterno on
Wednesday night, thousands of students stormed the downtown area to
display their anger and frustration, chanting the former coach’s name, tearing
down light poles and overturning a television news van parked along
College Avenue . . . . The demonstrators congregated outside Penn State’s
administration building before stampeding into the tight grid of downtown
streets. They turned their ire on a news van, a symbolic gesture that expressed
a view held by many: that the news media had exaggerated Mr. Paterno’s
role in the scandal surrounding accusations that a former assistant coach,
Jerry Sandusky, sexually assaulted young boys.
(Schweber 2011)
Žižek’s distinction between subjective and objective violence ties these late-
medieval descriptions of popular outrage together, spotlighting what is a perdurable
problem. The objective violence, that is, the appalling social situations that
dominant ideologies naturalise into invisibility, gives rise to subject violence at
certain flash points. But however justified, anger exercised outside of privileged
circles tends to be treated as illegitimate and threatening. To return to the emotions
of war, such constructions are clearer today than ever. Heads of state are called
upon to respond ‘presidentially’, that is, with missiles, to aggression. Populations
suffering the wars of their leaders, in contrast, are systematically killed for trying
to defend themselves against occupying forces.
70 Tracy Adams
Notes
1 Stricken in 1392 by an intermittent mental illness that would disable him for the rest of
his life, Charles VI of France appointed his brother Louis of Orleans by royal ordinance
to carry out administration of the government when he, Charles, was incapacitated.
However, the king’s uncle, Philip of Burgundy, tried to seize power for himself. After
Philip’s death, his son Jean succeeded him as Duke of Burgundy and the conflict
intensified until Jean had Louis assassinated in 1407. This episode was taken up in
chronicles over the next several generations as the tragic source of all France’s problems:
the feud spanned generations, making possible Henry V’s invasion and occupation of
France and the brief but amazing appearance of Joan of Arc. It ended only with the
Treaty of Arras of 1435, presided over by Charles VII and Philip of Burgundy.
2 ‘At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signs of violence are acts of crime and terror,
civil unrest, international conflict. But we should learn to step back, to disentangle
ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjective’ violence, violence
committed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to preserve the contours of the
background which generates such outbursts. A step back enables us to identity a violence
that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance’ (Žižek 2008,
p. 1). Some of the most recent examples of Žižek’s categories in recent scholarship
include Darling (2014), Vadén, (2014, pp. 127–154), and Wilson (2013, pp. 28–48).
3 Even Louis’s contemporary detractors laud his intelligence and eloquence. Pintoin
(1994, vol. 3, p. 36) reports that Philip of Burgundy admitted that his nephew was
‘commendable for his affability and singular eloquence’. Louis was the most fluent man
of his day, writes the monk, who goes on to relate that he had personally watched the
duke orate against the best. A document recording the arguments of the Dukes of
Bourbon, Orleans, Burgundy and Berry regarding the Schism supports Pintoin’s
evaluation (Douët-d’Arcq 1863, vol. 1, p. 143). Eloquent and self-effacing, the Duke
of Orleans places the Schism in its larger context. He then works a captatio benevolentiae,
explaining that he agrees with his opponents in principal, that the ‘voie de cession’, that
is, the resignation of both popes so that a new one can be elected, is the only solution
to the Schism but then enumerates why he believes that subtracting obedience from the
Avignon pope will not result in the resignation of the two popes. Christine de Pizan
(1936, vol. 1, p. 174) is warmly positive about the Duke’s good nature and manners.
4 On the Orleans family’s use of grief as propaganda see Hutchison (2016).
5 See Bozzolo, C. and Loyau, H. 1982–1992, La Cour amoureuse, dite de Charles VI, vol. 1,
Léopard d’or, Paris, pp. 7–34.
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Autrand, F. 1994, Charles V, Fayard, Paris.
Autrand, F. 1995, ‘La succession à la couronne de France et les ordonnances de 1374’, in
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Autrand, F. 2009, Christine de Pizan: une femme en politique, Fayard, Paris.
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Bozzolo, C. & Ornato, M. 1986, ‘Princes, prélats, barons et autres gens notables à propos
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5
VIOLENT COMPASSION IN
LATE MEDIEVAL WRITING
Catherine Nall
In Book Two of his Troy Book (1412–1420) the poet John Lydgate describes the
attempted landing of the Greeks on Troy’s shores. In the midst of the fighting
that follows, as the Trojans attempt to prevent the landing, Protesilaus, a Greek,
withdraws from the battle and stands on the shore. From this vantage point, he
sees the massive slaughter inflicted on his men:
Wher as him þouȝt, his herte gan to ryue

Of cruel Ire and also of pite,
Þat he kauȝt, only for to se
His men lyn slayn endelong þe stronde,
And some of hem comynge vp to londe,
Dreint in þe se among þe flodis depe.
For whiche þing he gan anoon to wepe
Ful pitously, al wer it nat espied,
Whos woful eyne myȝte nat be dreyed
For þe constreynt which sat so nyȝe his hert.
Til at þe last, among his peynys smert,
So cruel Ire gan his hert enbrace,
Þat sodeynly with a dispitous face,
With-out abood, þouȝte how þat he
Vp-on her deth wolde avengid be.
(Bergen 1906–1935, Book 2, ll. 8352–8366)
Lydgate here maps emotional and somatic change in a way that his source does
not.1 In Lydgate’s version, Protesilaus begins by feeling both ‘cruel Ire’ (anger) and
pity – the effect of which is to make him feel that his heart will split apart or
tear (‘ryue’). Looking at his men dead and dying, he weeps ‘[f]ul pitously’ –
74 Catherine Nall
his weeping is both full of pity and produces pity in those who witness it, although,
as Lydgate tells us, in this case there is no witness (‘al wer it nat espied’). But then,
‘at last’, anger begins to ‘enbrace’ – affect or influence – his heart, so much so that
with ‘dispitous face’ he enters the fighting ‘where he saw þat þer was grettest pres’
(l. 8372), and kills every Trojan he encounters. In order to avenge the deaths of
his men, pity has to give way to anger. The face that was full of pity, the weeping,
‘woful’ eyes, becomes ‘dispitous’ – cruel, pitiless – a carefully chosen word which
emphasises the connection between cruelty and lack of pity, and, in particular, the
renunciation of pity required for Protesilaus to go and kill other men.
Pity has a conspicuous presence in late medieval war writing. As one of the
key attributes of good kingship, occupying a central place as a virtue to be practised
both by rulers and by those who prosecute war, pity is primarily associated in a
range of genres – from romance to speculum principis to military treatise – with the
restraint of violence. In such idealising genres, pity comes into effect to spare
the life of an opponent, to see the ransoming rather than the execution of prisoners,
to prevent the captured town from being razed to the ground, to stay the hand of
the victor. Yet, as the above example illustrates, pity also has a different realisation
in late medieval war writing as the emotion that acts as a precursor to vengeance;
as one that, far from limiting bloodshed, forms a crucial part of the affective
foundation of the practice of violence.
The terms pity, ‘routhe’, mercy, ‘misericorde’, and compassion are frequently
collocated in late medieval writing, and are often used to explicate each another.2
Two Middle English works derived in whole or in part from Giles of Rome’s De
Regimine Principum (c. 1280) gesture towards the relatedness of these terms. In his
translation of De Regimine Principum (c. 1400), John Trevisa glosses ‘misericordia’
as mercy and as ‘rewþe’ (pity, compassion). His definition, based on Aristotle’s
definition of pity, explains that if a man
is sory for anoþeris harme and troweth namlich þat he hath wrongfullich þat
harme, þat is misericordia, rewþe; for, ii Rethoricorum, it is iseid þat
misericordia is not elles but a certein sorwe of harme þat is iseie and iknowe
and corrumpeth [corrupts] a man and maketh hym sory þat hath þat harm
with wrong.3
While he who has ‘reuthe of no thing’ is cruel, to have ‘rewthe of al þyng’ is

‘mollis (nesche)’, that is tender, soft or weak, and ‘wommanliche’. The merciful
man is the one who has compassion or ‘rewþe’ in the right quantity and in the
right circumstance, following Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean: ‘And he þat hath
rewþe of hem þat hauen harme wrongfulliche is mene and is to preisyng and is
icleped mysericors, merciable’ (Governance, p. 136).
In his Regiment of Princes (c. 1411), also based in part on De Regimine Principum,
Thomas Hoccleve explains, following St Augustine, that ‘Mercy . . . Of herte is a
verray conpassioun / Of othir mennes harm’, while pity works to make men
‘fonde / To help him þat men sen in meschif smert’.4 He explains the relationship
Violent compassion in late medieval writing 75
between the two by stating that mercy ‘springs’ and ‘grows’ out of pity: ‘Out of
pitee growith mercy and spryngith’. A man without pity cannot perform acts
of mercy: ‘For pitelees man can do no mercy’ (Regiment, ll. 3305–3306). Deeds of
mercy, then, are not empty of emotion, but are generated by and depend upon
the presence of the feeling of pity.
This affective dimension to the virtues of pity and mercy is present across many
different definitions. St Augustine, citing Cicero, argues that ‘“Among your virtues
none is more admirable and agreeable than your compassion”. And what is
compassion but a fellow-feeling for another’s misery, which prompts us to help
him if we can?’ (Augustine 1950, p. 285). Chaucer’s Parson describes ‘misericorde’
as ‘a vertu by which the corage of a man is stired by the mysese of hym that is
mysesed. / Upon which misericorde folweth pitee in parfournynge of charitable
werkes of misericorde’.5 Brunetto Latini’s definition of ‘Misericorde’ in Li Livres
dou Tresor (c. 1260–1266) explains that it ‘est une vertus par qui li corages est
esmeus sour les mesaisiés et sor la poverté des tormentés’ (‘is a virtue through
which the heart is moved by those who suffer and by the poverty of the tormented’)
(Carmody 1948, p. 292; Barrette & Baldwin 1993, p. 257) . The twelfth-century
Moralium dogma philosophorum explains that ‘Misericorde est une vertuz qui fait le
cuer tendre et pitex vers celx qui sont apressé de mesaise’ (‘Mercy is a virtue that
makes the heart tender and piteous towards those who are oppressed by suffering’)
(Holmberg 1929, p. 30, my translation) . These definitions also emphasise the
connection between (felt) emotion and (resultant) action. Those who feel pity,
compassion or mercy are moved to act; they are prompted to relieve those for
whom they feel pity.
Theseus and the Theban widows

In Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ pity works both to limit and to perpetuate violence.
It is the display of the weeping pity of the women who beg for the lives of Arcite
and Palamon that produces compassion in Theseus and prevents him from
administrating strict justice: ‘And eek his herte had compassioun / Of wommen,
for they wepen evere in oon’ (ll. 1770–1771). But it is this emotion, too, that
leads to the devastating violence inflicted on Thebes, as Theseus kills Creon, puts
the people to flight, ‘And by assaut he wan the citee after, / And rente adoun
bothe wall and sparre and rafter’ (ll. 989–990).6
As Theseus returns to Athens following his conquest of the Amazons, he is
interrupted by a group of grieving widows, who make ‘swich a cry and swich
a wo . . . / That in this world nys creature lyvynge/ That herde swich another
waymentynge’ (ll. 900–902). They tell Theseus that their husbands died fighting
against Thebes but that the tyrant Creon – the ruler of Thebes – has denied the
bodies proper burial: he ‘“ wol nat suffren hem, by noon assent, / Neither to been
yburied nor ybrent, / But maketh houndes ete hem in despit”’ (ll. 945–947).7 On
two occasions in this long speech, the widows implore Theseus to feel the pity so
76 Catherine Nall
notably absent in Creon. On the first occasion, the widow of Cappaneus begs
Theseus to:
“Have mercy on oure wo and oure distresse!

Som drope of pitee thurgh thy gentillesse,
Upon us wrecched wommen lat thou falle”
(ll. 919–921)
The widow links Theseus’s nobility – his ‘gentillesse’ – with his ability to feel pity
(the drop of pity can fall because of his nobility). On the second occasion, having
fallen on the ground (‘They fillen gruf and criden pitously’, l. 949) – a traditional
posture of supplication – the widows collectively reiterate their plea:
“Have on us wrecched wommen som mercy,

And lat oure sorwe synken in thyn herte”
(ll. 950–951)
The repetition of ‘lat’ (‘allow’) in both of these supplications is interesting. Theseus

must allow a drop of pity to fall; he must allow ‘their sorrow [to] sink in his heart’.
To have mercy requires opening oneself up to a kind of transference of another’s
suffering – allowing their sorrow to sink in his heart. But it is also something that
is controlled and that is subject to reason – one can decide whether or not to allow
oneself to feel pity.
These are injunctions to feel pity. In linking Theseus’s status with the
demonstration of pity, the women emphasise what is at stake in this moment – a
failure to feel pity would be an indictment of Theseus’s nobility. If anything,
Chaucer lessens the coercive element of his source: in Boccaccio’s Il Teseida, the
women say that ‘If high nobility, as we believe, dwells within you, take pity upon
us now’ (Havely 1980, p. 109). But Chaucer also makes it clear that Theseus does
feel this emotion.8 He carefully delineates the emotional process taking place in
Theseus:
This gentil duc doun from his courser sterte

With herte pitous, whan he herde hem speke.
Hym thoughte that his herte wolde breke,
Whan he saugh hem so pitous and so maat,
That whilom weren of so greet estaat
(ll. 952–956)9
Witnessing the women’s suffering – through hearing them speak and seeing them
‘pitous’ and ‘maat’ (helpless) – makes the ‘herte pitous’, and the compassionate
heart is vulnerable – Theseus thinks that his heart will break.10 Chaucer also
emphasises the cognitive aspects of pity – that feeling of pity is partly produced by
a knowledge that the women were once of such high status. It is not presented as
an irrational emotion in this sense, but one that is produced through Theseus’s
judgement and evaluation of the women’s condition. At the same time, that their
status is relevant at all points to the discriminatory nature of compassion, as it
differentiates between those who deserve to be pitied, and those who do not.
Chaucer provides an explanation for why Theseus can be moved in such a way.
As he puts it on four occasions, and in one instance specifically in relation to
Theseus, ‘Pitee renneth soone in gentil herte’.11 This seems to be both figurative
and literal: pity has a liquid quality; it can ‘run’. Medieval texts regularly figure
pity in this way, as something that moistens the heart: the Ayenbite of Inwit explains
how pity ‘bedeaweþ þe herte’, and writes of the ‘wetnesse of pite’ (Gradon 1965,
p. 116, l. 24; p. 242, l. 16); a late fifteenth-century sermon refers to the ‘moystnes
of pite’ (cited in Langum 2015, p. 269).12 Stephen Scrope’s mid-fifteenth century
translation of Christine de Pizan’s Epitre d’Othea explains that ‘Ingratitude . . .
drieth þe welle of pite, þe dewe of grace and þe ryuer of merci’ (1970, p. 67,
ll. 17–18). Such phrases are usually understood in their figurative sense alone, but
they surely also relate to wider understandings of the physiology of emotion, of
the movement of vital spirits to and from the heart. The ‘moistness’ of pity
explains why it was understood that as the body dries in later life there was a
corresponding decline of pity and compassion; why the phlegmatic was thought
to be piteous; and why women, naturally more moist, were supposedly more
compassionate (Langum 2015, pp. 269–270).13 It also explains why weeping – a
purging of excess moisture – is so closely identified as an outward sign of sorrow
and pity, and why, in the example discussed above, Lydgate’s Protesilaus’s ‘woful
eyne myȝte nat be dreyed / For þe constreynt which sat so nyȝe his hert’.14
Similarly, the common image of a drop of pity plays on this quality of pity,
seeming to mean not only a small amount, but also a liquid drop. Asserting that
pity runs quickly in a noble heart posits an essential difference between the heart
of a noble and that of a non-noble. Indeed, for some writers, what is at issue is
not only that noblemen naturally feel pity, but that a churl is incapable of feeling
it.15 The ability to feel pity, then, reinforces class difference and supports hierarchy;
the ability not only to feel it but crucially to act on the piteous impulse makes
manifest and maintains privilege, specifically masculine, aristocratic privilege.
Arthur and the giant

For the author of the Alliterative Morte Arthure (c. 1400) the generation of pity in
both his protagonist and in his audience is crucial. In his description of Arthur’s
encounter with the giant, the poet foregrounds pity, and in so doing departs from
previous accounts of their meeting, including those of his sources. When Arthur
arrives in France in the initial stages of his campaign against Rome, he hears news
of a giant who has been terrorising the local inhabitants and has abducted the
duchess of Brittany. This moment in the account of Arthur’s reign appears across
the Arthurian chronicle tradition. It originates in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History
of the Kings of Britain in the late 1130s and then reappears in subsequent versions
78 Catherine Nall
– in the Anglo-Norman of Wace, the early Middle English of Layamon’s Brut,

the Alliterative Morte Arthure and Malory’s Morte Darthur.
Geoffrey of Monmouth simply reports that ‘news reached Arthur that a huge
giant had come from Spain’ (Reeve 2007, p. 224). Geoffrey does not give the
details of Arthur’s response to this news. Rather, he states that ‘[s]o mighty a
warrior as Arthur was unwilling to lead his army against such a monster, as he
could destroy it single-handed and wanted to encourage his troops by doing so’
(Reeve 2007, p. 224).
Wace’s account is similarly indirect, but more graphic in terms of what the
giant has done. The point of this description, though, seems to be to emphasise
that nobody has dared challenge the giant until this point: ‘There was no man in
the land so bold, no young man, whether noble or peasant, however proud or
brave, who dared to fight the giant or venture into his neighbourhood’ (Wace
1999, p. 285). In both Geoffrey’s and Wace’s versions, the encounter serves to
highlight Arthur’s courage and his ability to inspire courage in his men.
Layamon’s account differs more substantially. Rather than the news being
reported second-hand, a ‘hende cniht’ (‘noble knight’) comes to Arthur to tell
him what the giant has been doing. It is a long speech, comprising 20 lines, which
goes further in outlining the injuries inflicted on the people. However, we are
not shown Arthur’s emotional reaction to what he has heard (Layamon 2001,
ll. 12802–12829).
The author of the Alliterative Morte Arthure realises the dramatic potential of
this moment. A Templar knight makes the following speech to Arthur:16
“Here is a tyraunt beside that tormentes thy pople,

A grete giaunt of Gene, engendered of fendes;
He has freten of folk mo than five hundreth,
And als fele fauntekins of free-born childer.
This has been his sustenaunce all this seven winteres,
And yet is that sot not sad, so well him it likes!
In the countree of Constantine no kind has he leved
Withouten kidd casteles, enclosed with walles,
That he ne has clenly distroyed all the knave childer,
And them carried to the crag and clenly devoured”.17
He goes on to tell Arthur that the giant has taken the duchess, ‘“the flowr of
all Fraunce or of five rewmes, / And one of the fairest that formed was ever”’
(ll. 861–862), intending to ‘ “lie by that lady ay whiles her life lasts”’ (l. 856). In
case this speech has not produced the appropriate emotional response of pity, the
Templar ends his speech to the king with the following, original, injunction:
“As thou art rightwise king, rew on thy pople

And fonde for to venge them that thus are rebuked!”.
(ll. 867–868)
The words of the Templar map out the connection between Arthur’s claim to be
a ‘rightwise king’, feeling pity, and the victims’ status as Arthur’s people, as his
subjects: ‘rew on thy pople’. As with the Theseus example, emotion is tied to a
claim to status and identity – in this instance that of being a righteous king. Again,
as with Theseus, Arthur does then feel the emotion he has been told to feel – and
this is one of this author’s remarkable innovations:
Then romes the rich king for rewth of the pople,

Raikes right to a tent and restes no lenger;
He welteres, he wresteles, he wringes his handes;
There was no wye of this world that wiste what he mened.
(ll. 889–892)
This is a heightened representation of emotional state and emotional process.

Arthur’s pity causes him to bellow, to writhe and contort, and to wring his hands.
Pity produces an array of outward signs here: the wringing of hands is often
associated with the feeling of pity for both genders – men and women alike wring
their hands as expressions of sorrow in the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and in
medieval literature more generally.18 Arthur does not, however, respond in the
way most often associated with the feeling of pity in various generic and textual
contexts: he does not weep. Rather, the writhing and contortion of the body are
this author’s way of expressing the presence of extreme mental and emotional
anguish.19
When Malory used the Alliterative Morte Arthure as the basis for the second tale
of his Morte Darthur, he altered his source in a way that strengthened the connection
between defence of subjects, the claims and obligations of conquest, pity, and
violence. The Templar here becomes the ‘husbandeman’ – a farmer – a member
of that group in society that suffers most through war. The ‘husbandeman’ outlines
the activities of the giant; the speech is truncated but is essentially the same as that
given by the Templar in the source.20 The husbandman then makes explicit the
effect that this description ought to have Arthur: ‘ “Now, as thou arte oure
ryghtwos kynge, rewe on this lady and on thy lyege peple, and revenge us as a
noble conquerroure sholde” ’ (p. 154, ll. 24–26). Malory doubles the coercive part
of this – maintaining the ‘ryghtwos kynge’ of his source but adding that a ‘noble
conquerroure’ should exact vengeance. He thus emphasises the connection between
pity, vengeance and claims to other identifiers – those of being a righteous king
and a ‘noble conquerroure’. Defence of subjects, taking action on their behalf, and
the emotional dimensions of political rule are connected here, and made part of
two overlapping responsibilities – those pertaining to kingship and those pertaining
to conquest.
Malory chooses not to include the description of Arthur’s extreme outward
display of pity given in the Alliterative Morte Arthure. Initially the effect that the
husbandman’s words have had on Arthur is only registered by the king’s statement
that ‘“Thy soth sawys have greved sore my herte”’ (p. 155, ll. 4–5). Arthur returns
80 Catherine Nall
to his tent and ‘carpys but lytyll’ (p. 155, l. 6). The affective response is deferred
until Arthur actually sees what the giant is doing. He sees the giant ‘gnawyng on
a lymme of a large man’, and three ladies turning ‘three brochis’; on those skewers
are ‘twelve chyldir but late borne, and they were broched in maner lyke birdis.
Whan the kyng behylde that syghte his herte was nyghe bledyng for sorow. Than
he haylesed hym with angirfull wordys’ (p. 156, ll. 28–34). There is an easier
movement from sorrow to anger, here, than in the example from Lydgate. While
Lydgate, Chaucer and the author of the Alliterative Morte Arthure dwell on
emotional processes, Malory acknowledges the presence of emotion, but does not
focus on the movement from one state to another.21
Elsewhere in the Morte Darthur, not to avenge one’s people or defend them is
about individual shame – but shame as something anticipated conditionally rather
than directly experienced. At the beginning of ‘Balyn le Sauvage’, Arthur is
told that King Royns of North Wales has entered Arthur’s land and ‘brente and
slew the kyngis trew lyege people’. Arthur responds by stating that ‘“Iff thys
be trew . . . hit were grete shame unto myne astate but that he were myghtyly
withstonde”’ (p. 47, ll. 9–12).22 Later on in the opening tale, Arthur is informed
that five kings have entered his lands ‘and brent and slewe and distroyed clene by-
fore hem bothe the citeis and castels, that hit was pité to here’ (p. 100, ll. 33–35).
Arthur responds by exclaiming ‘ “Alas!’ . . . yet had I never reste one monethe syne
I was kyng crowned of this londe. Now shall I never reste tylle I mete with tho
kyngis in a fayre felde, that I make myne avow; for my trwe lyege peple shall nat
be destroyed in my defaughte”’ (p. 101, ll. 1–4). In these instances, the responsibility
of kingship is recognised, but there is no explicit emotional reaction, but rather
a pre-empting of an emotional state: the potential to feel shame, and to be shamed,
in consequence.
It is tempting to see this emotional shift over the course of the Morte Darthur
as evidence of Arthur’s maturation. The giant episode is commonly seen as a kind
of rite of passage for Arthur (and for heroes more generally), in the sense that it
demonstrates Arthur’s ability to rule and his mastery of sinful impulses such as
lechery and gluttony (Cohen 1999). The capacity to feel pity, not just anticipate
shame, becomes part of the crucial formula of Arthur’s kingship. In this sense,
pity’s relationship to power is once more important. As Felicity Riddy puts it,
‘[p]ity as a social virtue sanctifies hierarchy, since it is predicated on the difference
between higher and lower, or between weaker and stronger: it is a mode of
relationship with one’s inferiors’ (Riddy 1994, p. 57). Arthur’s pity makes manifest
and legitimises the political power he already has over his conquered subjects –
hence why the husbandmen in his speech emphasises Arthur’s status as conqueror
as well as king, both by elaborating on the duties attendant on conquest and by
addressing Arthur as ‘Sir Conquerrour’ (p. 154, l. 33).23
Pity is not realised by these writers simply as a virtue to be performed. Those
whose actions make the virtue of pity manifest are also depicted as having been
moved to act. Theseus and Arthur are exemplary producers of emotion, using
emotion in the correct way. Killing a giant is clearly not the same kind of violence,
in either scale or consequence, as razing a city to the ground, but both instances
depend on an understanding that violence might be the outcome of compassionate
pity. In his 1487 translation and edition of Jacques le Grand’s Book of Good
Manners, William Caxton urges his readers to ‘take the waye of pyte & to leue
vengeance’ (book 3, ch. 1, STC 15394, sig. Eijr). In these examples, to ‘take the
waye of pyte’ is not to reject vengeance, but to enact it.
The politics of pity

The cultivation of pity in one context is clearly inappropriate for the actual
practice of violence, which depends on the suppression of pity. Perhaps more than
any other state, war requires the active management of compassion; the ability to
feel and not feel as circumstances dictate. In the instances of Arthur and Theseus,
compassion for one group of people does not translate into compassion for another
group. Perhaps no ethical question is raised by Arthur: the authors work hard to
demonstrate the giant’s monstrosity, as compassionate king is juxtaposed with
inhuman, baby-eating giant. In the case of Theseus though, such discriminatory
compassion is more problematic. Compassion for the widows leads to the dispos-
session of the Theban people, the destruction of the city, and the production of
a ‘taas of bodyes dede’ (l. 1005). Significantly, Chaucer omits the detail given in
Boccaccio’s Il Teseida that Theseus had those bodies buried (McCoy 1974). The
outcome of Theseus’s compassionate violence is not so unlike the situation that
gave rise to his compassion in the first place: one pile of unburied bodies replaces
another.
These examples rely to varying degrees on images of suffering in order to
generate pity: the dead men lining the shore or drowning in the sea; the grieving,
swooning widows; the devoured children; the abducted, raped and murdered
duchess. Indeed, images of suffering can be used to support violence as much as to
contest it. Writing on what she terms ‘shock-pictures’ – photographs of atrocity –
Susan Sontag questions the presumption that such images could ‘only stimulate the
repudiation of war’, asking whether it is not also the case that they can ‘foster
greater militancy’ (Sontag 2004, pp. 7–8). She calls attention to the different,
indeed antithetical, responses (for peace, for revenge) such images may evoke
(Sontag 2004, pp. 11–12). Images of suffering in the examples I have considered
support the notion that suffering is best met with violence, with yet more suffering.
The ethical complexities of compassion, the division of people into those who
do or do not deserve to suffer, those who do or do not deserve compassion, are
perhaps nowhere so evident as in the rhetoric of crusading, particularly as it
emerged in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Written against the
backdrop of arguments for Anglo-French peace, calls to crusade in this period
attempt to inculcate compassion for one group of people only to then urge
violence against another.24 When in c. 1411 Thomas Hoccleve argues for
peace between England and France, compassion is key. He urges his addressees
of ‘Cristen Princes’ to ‘haven conpassioun’ of ‘Cristen blood’; he refers to the
82 Catherine Nall
death and destruction wrought by war, of lives, buildings, crops and the rape of
women; and exhorts his readers to ‘Lat your pitee now awake / That longe hath
slept, and pees betwixt yow make’ (Regiment, ll. 5534–5340). But, once peace has
been made, he urges that those whose pity has been awakened should ‘on the foos
of Cryst, your redemptour,/ Werreieth’ (Regiment, ll. 5430–5432).
The Letter to King Richard II, probably written in 1395, by Philippe de Mézières
(b. 1327–d. 1405), a monk, and former chancellor of Cyprus and member of
Charles V’s council, uses compassion in a similar way. This text has multiple
agendas – a marriage between Richard and Isabella, daughter of Charles VI, peace
between France and England, an end of the papal schism, and, crucially in this
context, a new crusade in the East. Philippe, referring to himself as ‘this Old
Solitary’, constructs the very writing of the text as an act produced by compassion:
‘he feels compassion now for those who have died by reason of it [the wound of
war] and still more concern and compassion for his Christian brethren who are
now alive . . .’ (Coopland 1975, pp. 7–8, 80).25
In this text, pity works more explicitly both in the service of arguments to limit
and to commit violence. In the opening ‘lamentation’ Philippe refers to the
destruction of nobles and churches, and to the creation of widows and orphans as
a result of the ongoing Anglo-French conflict (Coopland 1975, pp. 7, 79). Later,
as part of his argument to promote peace between England and France, he urges
Richard to ‘have true compassion and bitter grief for the blood of Christian men’
(Coopland 1975, pp. 43, 116). He constructs the killing of other Christians as
a re-enactment of the crucifixion: ‘by shedding the blood of our fellow creatures,
English and French alike, once more we have killed sweet Jesus Christ’. Instead,
‘a new compassion’ (‘fresche compassion’) should be shown ‘for the death of
our gentle Redeemer . . . and heart-felt horror at the effusion of the blood of our
Christian brothers’ (Coopland 1975, pp. 44, 117).
Sarah McNamer uses these examples to demonstrate the existence of a ‘significant
current of protest against violence in late medieval England’. She argues that ‘[p]ity
for Christ [. . .] becomes the foundation of an ethics of nonviolence toward other
Christians’ (McNamer 2010, p. 154). While I agree that Philippe and Hoccleve do
indeed move from a focus on compassion for Christ to a call for compassion for
Christians, to read these texts as protesting violence is problematic. Both authors
also actively promote violence: it is just that the target of violence is shifted from
the Christian to the non-Christian. The compassion that in one context is designed
to limit Christian bloodshed, in another supports the shedding of the blood of non-
Christians. Pity serves to legitimise and encourage violence towards non-Christians.
According to Philippe, a new campaign in the East requires compassion. He refers
to how the king’s subjects who live in Jerusalem ‘are held in serfdom by King
Vigilant’ (earlier identified as the sultan of Babylon). He refers to how these
subjects are ‘beaten and ill-treated, and how they pay great tributes and aids, to the
shame and dishonour of all Christian kings’, and to Richard and Charles in
particular. The ‘Catholic Faith . . . is trodden under foot, dishonoured, destroyed,
deserted and abandoned’; the holy places ‘lie profaned, ruined, and emptied’.
‘What man is there’, asks Philippe:
baptised in the name of the blessed Jesus, whose heart is so steeled that
he can hear tell of these great wrongs and not be moved to compassion, and
so to offer in devotion to God his body, his goods and all that lies in his
power, to remedy the very great evils and dishonour of Christendom, here
briefly recited? There is a great danger that those Christians who do not
have compassion will be deprived of a share in Jerusalem triumphant . . .
(Coopland 1975, pp. 29, 102)
As with the earlier injunctions to feel pity, Philippe performs a number of man-
oeuvres that link the performance of that feeling to wider identity claims. First,
Philippe links compassion to kingly authority – those who suffer are not simply
Christian brothers in the East, but the king’s subjects: they thus have a particular
claim on Richard. Philippe then makes compassion part of a specifically Christian
identity: ‘What man is there, baptised in the name of the blessed Jesus, whose heart
is so steeled that he can hear tell of these wrongs and not be moved to compassion?’
The rhetorical question connects a hard heart – in this case a heart of steel (‘cuer
d’acier’) – with the inability to feel compassion, which is a commonplace in
Middle English texts too.26 The appropriate response to hearing about what is
inflicted on these subjects is one of compassion, and feeling that compassion
manifests itself in the commitment of body and goods to a new crusade. To not
feel compassion in response to hearing of the injuries and insults endured is
not without risk. Philippe spells out the consequences of such an affective deficiency:
the failure to feel compassion becomes a dereliction of Christian duty, with very
exact consequences for the reader in the afterlife. These injunctions, then, construct
compassion as a crucial part of noble, kingly and, indeed, Christian identity.
These images of pitying-conquering kingship evoke the model of divine pity
and punishment, of God ‘of pitee the auctour’ (Regiment, l. 3025). This movement
from the suffering of the people, to pity for them, and then to (new) violence, is
one modelled on biblical precedent. In particular, it relates to Exodus, chapter 22,
verse 27: ‘si clamaverit ad me, exaudiam eum, quia misericors sum’ (‘if he cry to
me, I will hear him, because I am compassionate’ [Biblia Sacra Latina Ex Biblia
Sacra Vulgatae Editionis 1970, p. 53.]). This precedent was well known to readers
and writers of the fifteenth century. A fifteenth-century Middle English translation
of Alain Chartier’s Quadrilogue Invectif (1422), for example, warns that
it is oftentymes founde in the olde writyngis that for the myserye of the
powr people [and] the wepyngis and sorowis of them . . . the diuine
iugementis hath yevyn full egre and sharpe punycion. Wherfor I counseile
euery man that fyndith hymself gilti in this trespas that he bewar, for it is
not to thynke that the turmentis of so many coragis and the pituous and
84 Catherine Nall
lamentable voice which addressyn their cryes, wepyngis and compleintis vp

to the high hevyn move nat with pite the mekenes of the right mercifull
and all-puyssaunt Creatour, that His iustice procedith nat to the confusion
of theim that cause the iniquityf wikednes.
(Blayney 1980, vol. 1, p. 172)
The presence of particular types of emotion in accounts of war-making does

important work for audiences, and part of that work is to communicate the justness
or legality of war. In particular, the presence of pity in the examples considered
here helps to mark the war as just, the violence as legitimate. According to just war
theory, defence of the rights of subjects is a legitimate reason to make war. William
Worcester, for example, in his Boke of Noblesse presented to Edward IV in 1475
states that ‘the second [just cause for war] is to withestande all soche mysdoers the
whiche wolde defoule grief and oppresse the peple of the contre that the kyng or
Prince is gouernoure of’ (British Library, ms Royal 18.B.XXII, fol. 4r). Nicholas
Upton, in his military and heraldic text De Studio militari finished in 1446, argues
that a war is just if it is waged in order ‘[t]o Avenge the wronges off poore people;
to poorge & rydde the cowntry off wykkyd lyuers’ (Walker 1998, vol. 1, p. 22).
The coercive element of this responsibility to defend subjects is made clear in
Caxton’s translation of Christine de Pizan’s Livre des faits d’armes, published
in 1489: war is just if it is for the defence of subjects and this, with other just
reasons, means that it: ‘is not onely leefful [lawful] to a prynce to moeue warre or
to mayntene it / but it is to hym pure dette to make it by oblygacion of tytle of
seignourie & iuredicion / yf he wyll vse it after rightful duete’ (Caxton 1937,
p. 12). Defence of subjects is a responsibility, an obligation of kingship and rule,
a ‘pure dette’ as Caxton has it.
There is, however, an affective gap in this theorisation. The emotional dimension
of how one goes from hearing about injustices committed to one’s subjects to
violence – the emotional process it might involve – is not articulated in these
theorisations of the just war. This gap can either be left blank or filled with other
emotions – shame, for instance, as in the examples cited earlier from the Morte
Darthur, or righteous indignation. The authors of the examples considered here
chose to fill that affective gap with pity itself. That pity has been felt legitimises the
violence that follows, and becomes the necessary emotion for any further violence.
A connection that is implied in just war theory – between pity and violence –
is made explicit by these authors: it is not an implied affective underpinning, but
an explicit emotional process, in which the experience of feeling pity leads to acts
of violence.
Pity has particular value in accounts of war-making. As such an essential part
of the ideology of kingship, to depict a ruler feeling pity constructs other kingly
and noble characteristics at the same time: to feel pity in one context implies one’s
ability to feel it appropriately in another. While the presence of shame, for
example, might suggest a consciousness of failing in some duty or expectation, to
pity brings with it an assertion of power – the power that comes with pitying
another.27 It acts, then, to communicate political subjection. Indeed, in some
narratives, a people’s subjection to a would-be ruler’s pity is but the first phase in
a process which will culminate in their subjection to other kinds of forces – legal,
political, or military – as a ruler’s pity brings about the willing subjection of a city
under siege.28
Notes
1 This interest in, and emphasis on, emotion, is characteristic of Lydgate’s handling of his
source in general. For the equivalent passage in Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis
Troiae, see The History of the Destruction of Troy (1974), trans. M. E. Meek, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, p. 120.
2 For an extremely useful discussion of these terms, and their relationship to one another,
see Burnley, J. D. 1979, Chaucer’s Language and the Philosophers’ Tradition, D. S. Brewer,
Cambridge.
3 Fowler, D. C., Briggs, C. F. & Remley, P. G. (eds) 1997, The Governance of Kings and
Princes: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the De Regimine Principum of Aegidius
Romanus, Routledge, New York, p. 135. Hereafter referred to as Governance. The
definition is based on Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, 2.8.
4 Hoccleve, T. 1999, The Regiment of Princes, ed. C. R. Blyth, Medieval Institute
Publications, Kalamazoo, Michigan, ll. 3312–4, 2999–3000. Hereafter referred to as
Regiment.
5 ‘The Parson’s Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer (1987), ed. L. D. Benson, 3rd edn, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, ll. 806–807. Subsequent references to the Canterbury Tales are
taken from this edition.
6 These two episodes have generated a great deal of discussion. See, in particular, Blamires,
A. 2006, Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 27–29;
Crane, S. 1994, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, pp. 20–23; Harding, W. 1997, ‘The Function of Pity in Three
Canterbury Tales’, The Chaucer Review, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 163–166; Mann, J. 1991,
Geoffrey Chaucer, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, pp. 171–175; Nolan, B.
1992, Chaucer and the Tradition of the ‘Roman Antique’, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, pp. 263–267.
7 Lack of burial itself suggests an absence of pity. In a Christian context, burial of the dead
was of course one of the works of mercy. For the author of the Book of Virtues and Vices,
an English translation of the Somme le Roi made in c. 1375, burial of the dead also
depends on the presence of ‘rewthe and pitee’. The author argues that ‘ʒif kynde and
pitee moueth thes sarazenes and Iues and mysbilueyng folke to birie the deede, moche
more scholde moeue vs rewthe and pitee and cristene bileue’ (Francis 1942, p. 211).
8 That Theseus feels something is important. Barbara Nolan reads Theseus’s behaviour in
this scene as according with Seneca’s recommendation that the ‘practitioner of true
Stoic clementia will “come to the aid of those who weep, but without weeping with
them”’ (Nolan 1992, p. 266). Although I agree that a distinction is made here (and
indeed in the case of King Arthur, considered below) between the weeping women and
what Alcuin Blamires (2006, p. 155, n. 14) terms the ‘active compassion’ of Theseus,
Seneca’s point more broadly is that the wise man will not feel pity at all: ameliorative
acts will be performed ‘with unruffled mind, and a countenance under control. The
wise man, therefore, will not pity, but will succour’ (Seneca cited in Basore 1928, II.6.3,
p. 441). Tears are one manifestation of the feeling of pity, a heart that seems like it might
break, as does Theseus’s, is another.
86 Catherine Nall
9 For Jill Mann (1991, pp. 172, 173), pity has ‘a levelling, unifying nature’ with the
‘power to overturn and obliterate the relationship between conqueror and suppliant’,
and she suggests that having Theseus dismount works to ‘illustrate dramatically the
levelling of conqueror with victims’. My understanding of pity in relation to power is
different, as I suggest below, and I would further add that it is significant that the first
thing Theseus does, having dismounted, is to raise the widows up from their still
prostrate position on the ground (‘he hem alle up hente’, l. 957), as it is an act that
dramatises their relative, differentiated, positions of power.
10 Hence the almost parodic response of Harry Bailly after hearing the ‘Physician’s Tale’
where he says that grief almost caused him to have a heart attack (‘I almost have caught
a cardynacle’) and that his ‘herte is lost for pitee of this mayde’ (‘The Introduction to
the Pardoner’s Tale’, ll. 313, 317).
11 The line appears in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, l. 1761, ‘Squire’s Tale’, l. 479, ‘Merchant’s
Tale’, l. 1986, and Legend of Good Women, F Prologue, l. 503. See also the ‘Man of Law’s
Tale’, l. 660: ‘As gentil herte is fulfild of pitee’.
12 See Langum 2015, pp. 269–270 for discussion of the moistness of pity.
13 For the phlegmatic as piteous, see Yonge, J. 1898, Gouernaunce of Prynces in Three Prose
Versions of the Secreta Secretorum, ed. R. Steele, EETS e.s. 74, Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trübner & Co., London, p. 220, l. 11.
14 For a discussion of weeping across different categories of text, see Lynch, A. 1991,
‘“Now, fye on youre wepynge!”: Tears in Medieval English Romance’, Parergon, vol.
9, no. 1, pp. 43–62.
15 See, for example, Lydgate, J. 1924–1927, Fall of Princes, ed. H. Bergen, EETS e.s. 121,
122, 123, 124, 4 vols, Oxford University Press, London, 4.2961.
16 Helen Nicholson (2001, p. 98) suggests that given the association between the Templars
and defence of the Holy Land, ‘the appearance of the Templar was a signal to the
audience that what followed was a holy war, depicting Arthur as a champion of
Christianity’.
17 Benson, L. D. (ed.) and Foster, E. E. (rev.) 1994, King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English
Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, Medieval Institute Publications,
Kalamazoo, ll. 843–852. Subsequent references are to this edition.
18 For other instances in the Alliterative Morte Arthure, see ll. 951, 2679, 3155, 3920, 4286
and of course the moment where the ‘bold men’ reprimand Arthur for his response to
Gawain’s death, saying ‘This is bootless bale, for better bes it never! / It is no worship,
iwis, to wring thine hands / To weep als a woman’, ll. 3975–3977.
19 When Arthur learns that Gawain has landed, and fears he is dead, ‘He al to-writhes for
wo, and wringand his handes’, l. 3920.
20 Malory, T. 2013, Le Morte Darthur, ed. P. J. C. Field, D. S. Brewer, Cambridge, vol. I,
p. 154, ll. 11–24. Subsequent references are to this edition.
21 This is characteristic of Malory’s style. As Andrew Lynch writes, ‘the emotional cast of
Malory’s work can be hard to articulate, partly because the text seems sparing in
interpretative commentary on the subject’: Malory’s Book of Arms: The Narrative of
Combat in Le Morte Darthur, (D. S. Brewer 1997, Cambridge), p. 134.
22 Malory adds the detail that those killed were Arthur’s ‘trew lyege people’.
23 Similarly, Theseus’s status as conqueror is emphasised in the widows’ supplication.
24 For similar arguments following the fall of Constantinople in 1453, see Harris, J. 2017,
‘Byzantine refugees as crusade propagandists: the Travels of Nicholas Agallon’, in
N. Housley (ed.), The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century: Converging and Competing Cultures,
Routledge, London and New York, pp. 34–46.
25 I have slightly modified the translation. Alain Chartier also presents himself as ‘moved
by compassion’ to write his Quadrilogue Invectif (Chartier 2011, p. 8, l. 4).
26 For example, a fifteenth-century sermon collection states that ‘prowde men arn [. . .]
harde in herte wyth-oute compassioun’ (Jacob’s Well 1900, ed. A. Brandeis, EETS o.s.
115, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, London, reprint 1973, p. 236, l. 29.
27 For discussion of treatments of shame in Middle English texts, see Trigg, S. 2012, Shame
and Honor: A Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter, University of Pennsylvania Press,
Philadelphia, pp. 130–132; Flannery, M. C. 2012, ‘The Concept of Shame in Late-
Medieval English Literature’, Literature Compass, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 166–182.
28 I am thinking here of accounts of Henry V’s siege of Rouen (1418–1419). See, for
example, the account of the siege written by John Page (Bellis, J. (ed.) 2015, John Page’s
The Siege of Rouen, Middle English Texts 51, Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg).
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88 Catherine Nall
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6
‘THUS OF WAR, A PARADOX
I WRITE’
Thomas Dekker and a Londoner’s view
of continental war and peace
Merridee L. Bailey
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries men and women in England
could be forgiven for thinking war was all around them: the English war with
Ireland, begun in 1594, had ended in ignoble fashion in 1603; the Spanish-Dutch
war had started in 1566 as a revolt of the Seventeen Provinces against the Spanish
Empire; England and Spain were in the grip of their own uneasy relationship,
punctuated from 1585 by intermittent bursts of violence; and closer to home on
English soil, apprehension about a possible state of civil war loomed. The succession
of James I to the English throne in 1603 would turn out to be a smooth and
unproblematic affair but an ageing Elizabeth I’s refusal to name James publicly as
her heir had encouraged a mood of insecurity. The circulation of information,
rumours and reports about war in cheap pamphlets, as well as the public discussion
about the scope of England's engagement in war in political treatises, contributed
to the steady stream of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature
alerting English audiences to military conflict. These contemporary writings about
real and anticipated warfare reflected, intensified and gave voice to the varied and
dissenting voices that could be heard speaking about war.
In these guises, war became a fashionable topic for the English presses. Reports
on wars in Ireland, France and in the Netherlands made popular reading for
English men and women, attested to in the growing proliferation of news pamphlets
(Raymond 2006; Pettegree 2014). The appetite for news about war on the
Continent was unsurprising given the close geographical and commercial ties
between the English and the Dutch, as well as the ramifications conflict between
Spain and the Dutch Republic had on English commercial and dynastic interests.
With some speed, Thomas Dekker, who made a living writing professionally for
London’s theatres and the printing presses, turned the threat of war and the close
commercial and political interests between England and the Continent into scenes
90 Merridee L. Bailey
in his plays and pamphlets. Performed on stage and read by London audiences,
Dekker’s writings became part of a culture of war writing in the early modern
period.
This chapter explores Dekker’s contribution to the contemporary literature on
war. From Dekker’s known works I identify 17 texts that refer to war, which I
have included among his war writings. These are: The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600),
The Wonderfull Yeare (1603), The Meeting of Gallants (possibly with Thomas
Middleton, 1604), Nevves from Graves-End Sent to Nobody (again with Middleton,
1604), The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London (1606), The Double PP (1606), A Worke
for Armourers (1609), The Ravens Almanacke (1609), Foure Birdes of Noah’s Arke
(1609), The Roaring Girl (with Middleton, 1611), If it be not good, the Diuel is in
it (1612), O per se O (1616), The Owles Almanacke (attributed to Dekker, 1618),
A Rod for Run-Awayes (1625), Warres, Warres, Warres (1628), Looke vp and see
Vvonders (attributed to Dekker, 1628) and The Honest Whore, Part II (1630).1
I focus on one of Dekker’s central war themes from the first decade of the 1600s
concerning overseas wars and London’s commercial interests.2 The texts,
A Shoemaker’s Holiday, The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London, and the related A Worke
for Armourers, The Meeting of Gallants and Warres, Warres, Warres, form the core of
this chapter, but other works are discussed when relevant.
Richard Strier has convincingly demonstrated that emotion was celebrated
in sixteenth and seventeenth century drama. Early modern writers displayed
‘emotional animation’ and worldly enjoyment. Moreover, passion and pride
‘unrepentantly’ pervaded the period’s plays (Strier 2011). Bridget Escolme (2013,
p. xvi) also hypothesised that early modern theatre audiences ‘went to watch
extremes of emotion and to consider when those extremes became excesses’. To
reflect on the emotional affect Dekker’s war writings might have had on his
audience I first make a close examination of how Dekker portrayed the negative
effects of military conflict on two characters in The Shoemaker’s Holiday.3 Dekker
gave teeth to war’s emotional effect by focusing on its impact on ordinary citizens.
Humanising the effects of war heightened the drama of the subject matter and
served as a reflection of the ways in which war shook ordinary people in their
day-to-day lives. However, I also agree with Strier and Escolme that while early
modern people went to playhouses (and read books) to test the boundaries of
social, political and emotional norms, we may be overlooking the more obvious
point that people also wanted to be entertained. While this chapter focuses on the
moral consequences of war and explores Dekker’s skill in giving voice to complex
and contested views about war’s value and cost, that he was also trying to rouse
emotions of enjoyment to retain his audience even about topics like war, death
and grief, is quite likely.
The chapter first provides a portrait of Dekker and why his social commentary
on war is worth exploring for the insights it gives into the intersections between
early modern drama, reactions to war and early modern mentalities. I then examine
the timing and content of particular works in relation to events occurring on the
Continent. I discuss how the Anglo-Dutch relationship was viewed, particularly
Thomas Dekker’s view of war and peace 91
in terms of how the Dutch were represented in early modern drama, and why
paying close attention to this clarifies how audiences interpreted the cultural and
physical proximity between England and the Low Countries and made sense of
war narratives. Throughout the chapter, the social, political and dramatic function
that emotional language served in war writing is examined. Dekker drew on the
playwright’s craft of heightened emotional tone, rhetorical devices and allegorical
imagery to influence his audiences’ reactions to war.
Thomas Dekker: ‘a professionally articulate man’

Literary scholars and historians who have written about Dekker have tended to
justify their focus on him in one of two ways. Laura Caroline Stevenson (1984,
p. 50) sees Dekker as representative of those ‘professionally articulate men’ who
made their living in late Elizabethan and Jacobean London as writers for both the
stage and the printing presses. Dekker’s biography can indeed be mined for nuggets
which locate him within his wider circle of peers who were writing citizen
comedies for London’s theatre-going crowds on topics that we assume entertained
London’s middle orders. In the first decade or so of his career Dekker wrote
prolifically for the Henslowe Companies. After Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Dekker,
like Thomas Heywood, wrote for the Queen’s Men. Again, like Heywood,
Dekker penned numerous pamphlets about London city life and like many other
popular writers incorporated the issues and concerns of day-to-day Londoners into
his texts. As Stevenson remarks about Dekker and the popular playwrights of the
day, including Heywood and William Haughton (1984, p. 50): ‘The popularity
of their works suggests that their attempts to reach a great number of people were
successful’. Dekker’s career milestones can be seen as typical for those in his
chosen profession. Even Dekker’s struggles with debt and poverty – he was im-
prisoned for debt in 1598 and 1599 and then again from c. 1612 until 1619 – were
common hazards for professional writers, given the precariousness of writing for
the playhouses in periods when plague threatened their closure.
Dekker also appeals to historians who can mine his writings for insight into the
social history of non-elite London. Dekker’s sensitivity to the particularities of
London merchant livelihoods has been widely seen as a consistent feature of his
writing and one of his strengths as an early modern voice of, and perhaps for, the
non-elite. Dekker is increasingly viewed as an astute commentator on early modern
life. Julia Gasper (1990) has attempted to see Dekker as driven by strong militant
Protestantism, Normand Berlin (1966) and John Twyning (1998) have focused
on the darker, angry, themes in Dekker’s texts, while Matthew Kendrick (2011)
explores the ‘artisanal consciousness’ of Dekker’s plays. Common themes in early
modern drama at this time included commercial life, overseas wars, material
success, positive mercantile identity and a social order that was in flux. Dekker’s
concerns with commercial stability and prosperity, topics consistently incorporated
into his war writings as they were in his other texts, were subjects that were
valued by the majority of London’s citizens who were engaged in trade and who
were the audiences for much of the literature and drama that appeared in print
and in the playhouses at this time.
Anna Bayman (2014) makes the crucial point that Dekker’s most significant
contribution to understanding early modern literature and its intersections with
contemporary forms of thinking, including warfare, lies not just in exposing what
was popular but in exposing the multiple contradictory voices and viewpoints
about political decisions and social structures heard across London. Dekker penned
sections in his texts that explicitly highlighted paradoxical reasoning, for example
writing ‘A paradox in praise of going to Law’, ‘A paradox in praise of a Pen’ and
‘A paradox in praise of Vacations’ in The dead tearme (1608) and ‘a Paradox in
praise of Serieants’ in Jests to make you merie (1607). The paradox of war with
which I began this chapter also played out in Dekker’s works, in which he
represented the destructive and constructive aspects of both war and peace. War
brought horror and death on a dramatic scale (‘tread, Knee deep in blood, and
trample on the Dead’, 1628, B1v);4 but it also curbed the excessive abundance
and consumerism created by peace (‘To cleanse the rancke-world, for to thee is
giuen, The skill of Minerals, [lead, iron and steele]’, 1628, B2v). Dekker’s, Warres,
Warres, Warres, (1628) shows him at his most explicit in voicing war’s complexity,
but this type of paradoxical thinking was typical for him, and his concern with the
economic and social consequences of war and peace in particular accounts forms
many of the paradoxes that can be found in his writings (Stevenson 1984; Seaver
2003; Bevington 2003).
The wider contemporary acknowledgement of contradictory and dissenting
views about warfare has not gone unnoticed. Bayman (2014, p. 147) notes that
‘even in 1623–5’ there were dissenting voices in England about the direction of
engagement in war, despite historians like Thomas Cogswell and Richard Cust
arguing that there was an ‘unusual degree’ of public pressure driving attitudes. As
well as providing a way for us to read Dekker’s war writings, historians rightly
point out that Elizabethan and Jacobean life was more generally awash with
contradictory views and tensions about warfare, mercantile identity, social order,
consumerism, trustworthiness and a host of other concerns (Seaver 2003; Bevington
2003; Mortenson 1976). As Bayman (2014, p. 147) argues, if anything helped the
presses to thrive it was not ‘uniformity and consensus’ but multiple viewpoints,
contradictory ideas and dissenting voices. Dekker’s literary works were part of a
wide tolerance during the early modern period for ambiguous and differing beliefs.
Dekker’s paradoxical writings on war are most revealingly read in this light.
The connection between contemporary wars and Dekker’s works needs to be
treated with some care since it is usually in a writer’s best interests to promote the
contemporary relevance of their work to increase their audience (Bayman 2014,
p. 79). However, there are undeniable moments of intersection between Dekker’s
choice of topics and contemporary conflicts. The cultural proximity between this
literature and attitudes towards the Dutch and to trade is an important point of
connection in Dekker’s war writings. But more than this, as Bayman (2014)
suggests, to fail to note the broader intersections between Dekker’s writings and
current events means we fail to see how Dekker contributed to his period’s wider
cultural understanding of war and conflict. Plays and pamphlets which featured
London soldiers, such as in A Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600), war in an allegorical city
much like London, described in A Worke for Armourers (1609), and the connections
between war and London’s outbreaks of plague, for example in The Meeting of
Gallants (1604), made war relevant to London audiences, just as Dekker himself
benefited from their timeliness.
The impact of war on mercantile London: overseas wars

and trade
Real-world conflict in the Low Countries provided Dekker with opportunities to
write – and importantly to sell – commercially relevant works. Much of Dekker’s
audience was centered upon the capital, given the higher literacy rates in towns
in this period, the likely overlap between London’s theatre-going audiences and
those who were reading pamphlets, and the explicit London specificity that
saturated Dekker’s descriptions of space and day-to-day activities (Bayman 2014,
pp. 29–36). In London, trade dominated the activities of the vast majority of the
city’s middle ranking population. These were the men and women who were
involved with or touched by commercial interests in the everyday course of their
lives. This was either through direct involvement in processing raw materials,
making items for sale, or buying and selling commercial quantities of textiles,
metalwork and foodstuffs, as well as those who worked in what would now be
labeled the hospitality trade, which included anyone working in London’s pubs,
theatres and on the waterways. In addition, there was the informal illegal work of
prostitutes and hucksters and the informal legal work of wives, daughters and
sisters in household workshops. With most Londoners immersed to some degree
in commerce, we should not under-estimate the city’s preoccupation with events
that impacted on supply, costs and overseas markets. Continental wars effected
trade and commercial activities and became part of the everyday gossip that
circulated within the city and grist for Dekker and his contemporaries’ writings
on war. For this reason, Dekker’s war writings extend beyond technical or emotive
descriptions of warfare to scrutinise ideas about honest labour, livelihoods and
economic damage, all of which mattered in people’s daily lives.
Since Elizabeth’s reign, the economic implications of the Dutch-Spanish war
had been among the most serious of these matters. Formal military assistance to
the Dutch had been provided in the 1585 ‘treaty of assistance’ in which the
English provided 4,000 foot soldiers and 400 mounted soldiers.5 Elizabeth’s
intention had been to protect the port of Antwerp, an economically significant
goal given England’s loss of its European port at Calais in 1558 (Poot 2013, p. 15).
As Anton Poot (2013, p. 15) notes, this treaty was not a conventional diplomatic
one but negotiated in terms of contractual exchange in which England supplied
goods and services (soldiers) in exchange for cash payments and with further
collateral for repayment set in the form of England’s right to station troops in key
overseas towns. Over the next few decades the English state would seek repayment
for the agreed costs of this military help, a tangled state of affairs which mirrored
the difficulties ordinary merchants so often faced when seeking repayment of
loans; a theme often used in the plots of mercantile dramas and city-comedies from
this same period (Poot 2013, p. 21). England’s own commercial interests were
complicated further by their conflict with Spain and the partially vested interests
they had in an ongoing Spanish-Dutch war. While England provided support
to the Dutch Republic in its war against Spain, following the Anglo-Spanish peace
and commercial treaty in 1604 English commercial interests had benefitted from
the Spanish embargoes preventing the Dutch from similar free trade with Iberia,
which in turn left English merchants free to trade in the Peninsula. With the start
of the 12-year truce between the Dutch and Spanish in 1609 these embargoes
were lifted, meaning the Dutch and the English found themselves in direct trading
competition.
Dekker’s The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London (1606) and its spin-off, A Worke for
Armourers (1609), were timed to take advantage of these events.6 The Seven Deadly
Sinnes was published in 1606 when the Dutch-Spanish war was at a stalemate,
largely because neither side was able to fund the armies needed to mount a
decisive victory. Instead, in 1606 reluctant peace negotiations between Spain and
the Netherlands began. The conflict between the Spanish and the Dutch was cited
in the second part of The Seven Deadly Sinnes, entitled ‘Warres’: ‘No, nor all those
late acts of warre and death, commenced by Hispaniolized Netherlanders’ (Dekker
1606, B4r). This was only one of several wars Dekker referred to in the passage
but a margin note: ‘Low country warres’ draws attention to this conflict and uses
readers’ current knowledge about neighbouring countries to introduce the allegor-
ical tale in which Money and Poverty fight a war for dominion over the earth.
Other references to war appeared in the opening to The Seven Deadly Sinnes
(1606) proper, in which Continental conflicts were again a focus of attention:
Antwerp (the eldest daughter of Brabant) hath falne in her pride, the Citties
of rich Burgundy in theyr greatnes. Those seuenteene Dutch Virgins of
Belgia, (that had Kingdomes to theyr dowries, and were worthy to be
courted by Nations) are now no more Virgins: the Souldier hath deflowred
them, and robd them of theyr Mayden honor.
(Dekker 1606, A1v-A2r)
Dekker’s language is rhetorically forceful and plays upon the notion of war and
the stain of rape, but also of war as polluting and contaminating: ‘the Warre hath
still vse of their noble bodyes, and discouereth theyr nakednes like prostituted
Strumpets’ (1606, A2r). There is an emotional shift between the imagery of
maidens’ honour and prostituted strumpets, but in both cases the language is
intended to arouse an emotional reaction to the destruction and pollution of war.
Dekker extends the themes of pollution and destruction by stating that London
faced even more devastation than its neighbouring war-torn countries because of
the plague’s arrival in the city. War, plague and famine were recurring and often
connected themes for Dekker. The emotions and language attributed to plague in
particular often closely mirror those associated with war, and vice versa.7 In The
Meeting of Gallants (1604) the personifications of War, Famine and Pestilence try
to outdo each other in descriptions of their destructive power. Pestilence uses the
language and imagery of war to evoke terror at its power:
As for lame persons, and maimed Souldiers

There I outstrip thée too; how many Swarmes
Of bruised and crackt people did I leaue
Their Groines sore pier’st with pestilentiall Shot:
Their Arme-pits digd with Blaines, and vicerous Sores,
Lurking like poysoned Bullets in their flesh?
(Middleton & Dekker 1604, A3r)
While war was a theme that allowed Dekker to explore the uncertainties of living
in the early modern period, the plague’s impact on the London population was
highly acute for Dekker and his contemporaries. The astronomical death rates, loss
of livelihoods and a state of pervasive fear were all felt close to home. Dekker’s
many plague-writings reveal the heavy cost recurrent plague outbreaks caused in
London. However, by drawing attention to the likenesses between plague and war
in his works, including the application of military expressions and war machinery
to descriptions of plague (‘pier’st with pestilentiall Shot’, ‘poysoned Bullets’), Dekker
coupled the experiences of both, heightening the emotional content of each and
reinforcing their analogous destructive power.
The timing for the publication of The Seven Deadly Sinnes (1606) and the
republication of the section ‘Warres’ a few years later is significant. The peace
negotiations between Spain and the Netherlands, which had begun when The
Seven Deadly Sinnes was published were successfully concluded with the signing of
a 12-year truce in 1609 for which England and France acted as guarantees (Poot
2013, p. 19). With some speed Dekker and his publisher, Nathaniel Butter, took
advantage of the newsworthiness of the 1609 treaty and reissued ‘Warres’ as a
discrete work complete with a new title, A Worke for Armourers (1609). A newly
written dedication and opening referred to the now ended wars between Spain
and the Netherlands: ‘The Hollander and the Spaniard haue bene (and I thinke
still are) your best Lords and Maisters’ and again: ‘Yet euen those Dutch warres,
haue bene vnto you that seru’d in them, but as wares in these dead times are to
Merchants and Tradsemen’ (Dekker 1609, A1r, A1v). Apart from the new opening
the rest of the tale was left intact since the allegorical story which explored socio-
economic conflict, the gap between the rich and the poor, and the ethics of
consumption had ongoing relevance (as well as requiring much less revision)
making the turn-around even faster for Dekker and Butter. The point Dekker was
making in A Worke for Armourers was that all of these real wars were as nothing
compared to the bloodshed and violence about to unfold in his allegorical tale
when the rich and the poor would do battle. While Dekker thus wrote about real
wars he also explored war in fictional registers, often using one of his favoured
literary styles of allegory or writing dialogues between different personifications,
for example, War, Famine and Pestilence in The Meeting of Gallants (1604) or the
cities, London and Westminster, in The dead tearme (1608). These highly
fictionalised works provided Dekker with a separate register through which to
present his audience with abstract cautionary tales about war’s consequences.8
The Dutch in England: comic figures and darker military

subplots
To understand why Dekker’s war writings from the 1600s were so observant of
conflicts happening in the lowlands, just as they were of the threat of civil war
and turbulent socio-economic conditions, we need not only to understand the
impact that war between the Dutch and Spanish had on London’s commercial
stability, but also to appreciate the sheer number of foreigners of Dutch origins
living in London at that time. From the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth
centuries the Dutch were the largest alien population in the city (Rubright 2014,
pp. 2, 12). Many of these migrants were seeking an escape from the conflict with
Spain. The close commercial ties between London merchants and the Dutch
meant that exchanges between groups and individuals were both personal and
professional. Marjorie Rubright (2014) identifies the complex ways in which the
Dutch were represented in literary texts at this time, sometimes as friends and
allies, sometimes as deceitful or as figures of fun.
In one of Dekker’s most successful plays, The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600), the
connection between war and (pseudo-) Dutch characters is key to the play’s plot.
One of the central characters, the aristocrat Roland Lacy, deserts from the English
army having hypocritically conscripted another central character, the journeyman
Rafe. Lacy spends the majority of the play impersonating a Dutch shoemaker to
comic affect – ironically in Rafe’s own former workshop. Lacy speaks with a
deliberately dreadful Dutch accent – ‘Yaw yaw. . .voour mack shoes groot and
cleane’ (Dekker 1600, C3v) – a trope Rubright (2014, p. 44) identifies as
‘inauthentic stage Dutch’. Lacy’s speech patterns were intended for comic effect
but we should remember that Londoners heard authentic Dutch spoken throughout
the city’s streets (Rubright 2014, p. 92).9 Lacy’s Dutch persona is a comic one and
he is by no means a sinister figure – perhaps because the war in this play takes
place between the English and the French – but his characterisation no doubt
played upon Londoners’ ambiguous attitudes towards skilled Dutch craftsmen by
reinforcing stereotyped differences between the native English and Dutch peoples.
Dekker’s other well-known play, The Roaring Girl (1611), co-written with
Middleton, reworked similar themes. In this play the villainous English-speaking
Tearcat assumes a Dutch accent to cheat money from Moll, Sir Beauteous and
Jack Dapper. But Tearcat also claimed to have been wounded in wars overseas in
order to gain sympathy. He identifies himself as: ‘A man beaten from the wars
sir’, while another character, Trapdoor, remarks: ‘Your Worship will not abuse
a souldier’ (Middleton & Dekker 1611, K3v, K3r). Because of the emotional
connotations war carries in the plays, it is an inducement to sympathy and concern.
But it also begets falsity and provides easy opportunities for deception. These
themes are more fully developed in A Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600). Sitting along-
side the comic-romantic plot in which Lacy’s Dutch persona is a figure of fun
is a much darker military theme which gives voice to the social and emotional
implications of war. Major themes include the turmoil caused by conscription;
the anguish of losing loved ones to war either through their absence or death; the
emotional costs paid by returning wounded soldiers; and the disruption war brings
to honest household workshops.
While much of The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600) is a reworking of Delaney’s The
Gentle Craft (published 1597), Dekker overlaid the original story with a new focus
on military service, returning soldiers, conscription and desertion (Womack 2008,
pp. 157–161). While Dekker’s play was published in 1600 it is set in an unspecified
past around the time of England’s fifteenth century wars in France, but the play’s
theme of conscription was highly topical for London at the start of the seventeenth
century. 12,000 men had recently been mustered to fight in Ireland with a further
4,000 needed almost immediately after, with London supplying 1,000 men (Seaver
2003, pp. 87–89). Dekker created the character Rafe who is conscripted to fight
in France and who is central to the war arc and through whom we see many of
war’s social, economic and emotional consequences. This included war’s effects
on different characters’ emotional constancy. Throughout the play Dekker associates
war with injustice of different types, although he does so subtly without explicitly
referring to unfairness in any of the speeches. However, it is there for the London
audience to spot. The honest merchant Rafe’s war injuries were unjust because
the aristocratic deserter Lacy had conscripted him. Lacy unjustly suffers no loss of
aristocratic status through his own desertion. Rafe’s young wife, Jane, is lied to
and deceived over her husband’s supposed death and tricked by the villainous
(albeit strangely sincere) Hammond into near marriage. These injustices are given
colour and narrative impact because they are related to crises in personal relation-
ships. This gives Dekker room to write about the emotional costs of warfare for
ordinary citizens.
Much of this emotional work is done through various characters’ reports on
the emotions and physical demeanours of others, not all of which is sympathetic.
Before she even speaks, the references to Jane focus on her tears at Rafe’s departure:
‘Leaue whining, leaue whining, away with this whimpring, this pewling, these
blubbring teares, and these wet eies’ (Dekker 1600, B3r). She is also introduced
as: ‘and this is blubbered Iane’ and then again: ‘She cannot speake for weeping’
(Dekker 1600, B3r, B4r). It is possible the other characters see her tears as insincere.
In her first lines, Jane herself describes her dread at Rafe’s departure: ‘O let him
stay, else I shal be vndone’ (Dekker 1600, B3r). The ‘vndone’ hints at her –
ultimately correct – realisation that her husband’s conscription into the army
means her security as the newly married wife of an honest guildsman is about to
change. Her fears continue to be associated with her financial security: ‘what shal
I do when he is gone?’ The character Firk answers ‘be not idle’, that is, work and
earn an honest living. The character Eyre is even more direct, hinting that Jane
has been unused to manual work: ‘Let me see thy hand Iane, this fine hand, this
white hand, these prettie fingers must spin, must card, must worke, worke you
bembast cotten-candle-queane, worke for your liuing with a pox to you’ (Dekker
1600, B4v). Jane’s emotions, and the physical display of them in the form of her
tears, are obliquely styled as being not the ‘right’ kind and her peers dismiss them
and her. Jane’s love is not self-less and her tears and fearful exclamations may have
been intended to disturb audiences. This was not because her reactions were
excessive but because they were nakedly self-focused. We know negative responses
were not a knee-jerk reaction to tears. When Rafe later cries in the play the
characters respond quite differently. We know the actor would have simulated
crying on the stage because other characters draw attention to his tears, asking:
‘Rafe, why dost thou weepe?’ and again ‘hees ouercome with sorrowe, he does
but as I doe, weepe for the losse of any good thing’ (Dekker 1600, E4v). Rafe’s
tears are sympathetically viewed and his tears are not dismissed as Jane’s had been.
Dekker uses explicit dialogue between the other characters to show their reactions
to tears and emotions in order to influence the audience into forming a particular
view of individual personalities, trustworthiness and likeability.
Dekker, however, manipulates several emotional registers in the Rafe-Jane
relationship and it is not ultimately clear that Jane’s fearful state is focused on
the financial cost of war. Rafe himself emphasises her emotional, romantic,
commitment to him – ‘Now gentle wife, my louing louely Iane’ – giving her
a gift of a pair of shoes. The shoes represent his craftsman’s skill and his hours of
labour, but Rafe’s description also presses home how intimate his gift is: ‘And
euerie morning when thou pull’st them on, Remember me, and pray for my
returne, Make much of them, for I have made them so, That I can know them
from a thousand mo’ (Dekker 1600, B4v).10 Jane herself later grieves for his
presumed death overseas and repeatedly reiterates her love for Rafe: ‘I haue but
one heart, and that hearts his due’; ‘Thogh he be dead, my loue to him shal not
be buried’ (Dekker 1600, F4v, G1r ). Jane’s emotional experiences unfold in more
complex ways over the course of the play with the audience shown how her
grief moulds her actions and decisions. Her tears in the later scenes are commented
on more sympathetically by her would-be suitor, Hammond: ‘Come, weepe not:
mourning though it rise from loue, Helpes not the mourned, yet hurtes them
that mourne’ (Dekker 1600, G1r). By drawing attention to theirs as a marriage of
on-going affection as well as one of financial security, Dekker heightens the
emotional impact of Jane’s loss. For her, the wars are bitter because of her personal
suffering at many levels: ‘Prest was he to these bitter warres in France, Bitter they
are to me by wanting him’ (Dekker 1600, F4v).
One consequence of war is that soldiers return to their homes after the fighting
is over. Returning soldiers were frequently identified as a threat to Elizabethan
and Jacobean London because they were thought to be unruly, threated good
order and were often unemployed (Ruff 2001, pp. 64–66). Dekker comments on
this problem in Warres, Warres, Warres (1628, D3r) when he writes about the
bleakness of the returning soldier’s plight:
Thus, Home at last, the Souldier comes,

As vselesse as the Hung-vp Drums:
And (but by Noble hands being Fed,
May beg hard; hardly yet get Bread.
Dekker was sympathetic to the difficulties soldiers faced. In Newes from Graves-End
(1604, D2r) he draws attention to the unfairness of the physical toll they were
forced to pay for England’s peace: ‘The Souldiers staruing at the doore, Ragd,
leane, and pale through want of blood, Sold cheape by him for Countries good’.11
Many soldiers returned to their homes maimed and physically altered by their
experiences and injured soldiers would have been a fairly common sight in London.
When Rafe returns to London missing one of his legs he fears what has become
of Jane in his absence and how he will now support her. His concerns over how
his injuries will affect his livelihood, however, are dealt with summarily:
Rafe.
. . .Where liues my poore heart? sheel be poore indeed
Now I want limbs to get whereon to feed.
Roger.
Limbs? hast thou not hands man? thou shalt neuer see a shoomaker want
bread, though he haue but three fingers on a hand.
Rafe.
Yet all this while I heare not of my Iane.
(Dekker 1600, E4r)
In this play, the cost of Rafe’s war injuries is not his productivity (he can still
work to make shoes with his hands) or even his emotional sense of wholeness as
a man, but his relationship with Jane. In this tale, wartime injuries are significant,
not because they threaten social harmony and public order, but because they play
on an intimate and primal fear about surviving war, but being left unrecognisable
to the people left behind.
Quickly sidestepping the real economic harm of injuries sustained in war frees
Dekker to concentrate on the emotional toll it exacts from those who fought. Far
more pressing than whether Rafe can work again is that his wounds have made
him unrecognisable to Jane and when he finally finds her she does not know him:
‘I lookte vpon her, and she vpon me . . . my lame leg, and my trauel beyond sea
made me vnknown’ (Dekker 1600, H4v). The play fudges the question of why
Jane cannot recognise him, given that he has, after all, lost his leg and not suffered
injuries to his face. The full nature of Rafe’s war wounds is never made entirely
clear. One stage direction notes: ‘Enter Rafe being lame’ and shortly after one of
the characters exclaims: ‘Lord how the warres haue made him Sunburnt: the left
leg is not wel it was a faire gift of God the infirmitie tooke not hold a litle higher’
(Dekker 1600, E4r).
War also created opportunities for people to take advantage of others and act
duplicitously or falsely. Rafe learns that the villainous, and wealthier, Hammond
has told Jane that Rafe has died overseas, leaving her free to remarry, despite her
ongoing commitment to remain a widow. However, Hammond’s lies are exposed
and Rafe is finally revealed to her by the intervention of Rafe’s co-worker Hodge,
who still has to point out to Jane that the unrecognisable man ‘lamed by war’ is
her husband:
Hodge
Ile shew you: Iane, dost thou know this man? tis Rafe I can tell thee:
nay, tis he in faith, though he be lamde by the warres, yet looke not
strange, but run to him, fold him about the necke and kisse him.
Iane
Liues then my husband? oh God let me go,
Let me embrace my Rafe.
(Dekker 1600, L1r)
The emotional outbursts from Rafe and Jane, again often depicted through
descriptions of their weeping, allows Dekker to focus his audience’s attention on
war’s cost for human subjects. Jane and Rafe weep at different moments in the
play to physically express their feelings. The other characters draw attention to
their tears, sometimes sympathetically and sometimes less so, but each time, their
explicit dialogue about the character’s emotional presentation highlights the
emotional salience of war to the audience. By separating his young couple through
Rafe’s conscription, by making them verbally express their suffering and by
showing them weeping, Dekker made war and the plight of ordinary soldiers and
families highly personal and intimate.
At the very end of the play Dekker extends war’s impact beyond the personal
and individual. The play ends on a jarring note at the final celebratory banquet
when all of the romantic entanglements have been satisfactorily untangled and
everyone should exit the stage happy and satisfied. Instead, the King announces
that war with France will begin anew with another round of conscription: ‘We
wil incorporate a new supply: Before one summer more passe ore my head, France
shal repent England was iniured’ (Dekker 1600, K3v). The final lines of the play
are given to the call for war: ‘When all our sports, and banquetings are done,
Warres must right wrongs which frenchmen haue begun’ (Dekker 1600, K4v).
But this final scene is ambiguous. The lines lack a celebratory ring and the overall
effect is one of being jolted out of the successful conclusion of the romantic and
comic plot and back into the real world where war looms on London’s horizon
(Mortenson 1976, pp. 251–252).
Afterword: War in the 1620s

War did, in fact, loom. While A Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600) was ostensibly set
in the past and referred to older wars in France, audiences could easily have related
the tale to current events. The relations between the Dutch and the English had
become increasingly strained during the 1610s, so that by 1621 when the 12-year
truce had ended, competition over fishing rights, whaling and the cloth trade
meant that relations between English and Dutch merchants were particularly poor
(Poot 2013, p. 24). The 1623 Amboyna incident, when the Dutch East India
Company (VOC) summarily executed 10 Englishmen from the competing English
East India Company (EIC) on dubious treason charges, led to worsening trade
relations between the Dutch and the English. Because of what would now be
described as heavy media reporting in England, public reaction and sentiment
to the Dutch worsened.12 At the same time, it was politically useful for James I to
agree to the Anglo-Dutch mutual defence treaty in June 1624, not least as England
was enmeshed in an even messier situation with Spain over the possible marriage
of James’s son, Charles, to Phillip III’s daughter, dubbed the ‘Spanish Match’
(Poot 2013, pp. 25–26). There was significant debate in Parliament and among
the general population about whether peace or war with Spain was the desirable
course of action. In 1625, Dekker wrote about the array of conflicts in Europe
and Spain’s role in (literally) fuelling war by flinging about its ‘fire-brands’:
Looke vpon Denmarke, Sweden, and those Easterne Countries: How often
hath the voice of the Drumme called them vp? Euen now, at this houre,
the Marches are there beating. How hath the Sword mowed downe the
goodly Fields of Italy? What Massacres hath in our memory beene in France?
Oh Germany! what foundations of bloud haue thy Cities beene drowned
in? what horrors, what terrors, what hellish inventions haue not warre found
out to destroy thy buildings, demollish thy Free States, and vtterly to
confound thy 17. Prouinces? . . . In all these thy miseries, the Spaniard hath
had his triumphs; his Fire-brands haue been flung about to kindle and feede
all thy burnings; his furies haue for almost foure score yeeres stood, and still
stand beating at the Anuils, and forging Thunder-bolts to batter thee, and
all thy neighbouring Kingdomes in pieces.
(1625, A3v)
By this time James’s early interest in diplomacy with Spain had changed dramatically
and England declared war in 1625, a policy about-face that Cogswell (2005, p. 1)
sums up as part of the ‘murkier aspects’ of the period’s foreign and domestic
policy. A few years later, in 1628, Dekker reflected on England’s position in
relation to war: ‘Thy Land-Souldiers (O England) shall not stand in feare of any
Italian Spin[. . .]|laes; nor thy Nauy Royall of any Spanish Armadoes: For, thine
enemies that rise agaynst thee, shall fall before thy face’ (1628, B2r).
Public debates about England’s involvement in war in the 1610s and 1620s
ranged from supportive to dissenting across a range of genres, including plays,
pamphlets, sermons, openly spoken resistance in public places like alehouses, and
royal proclamations (Cogswell 2005, p. 312). Understanding how the public
debated war and peace has occupied historians for some time, however, as Bayman
(2014) suggests, there was a greater diversity of opinion about war’s merits and
costs than has perhaps been recognised. Dekker’s “paradoxical” writings about war
were not an attempt to work through competing claims to achieve a resolution
to the ‘problem’ of war, but rather indicate a deeper acceptance of conflicting
impulses about the nature of war in the early modern period. Bayman (2014,
p. 143) argues that: ‘commercial prosperity and the social order – rather than
confessional struggle, international harmony, and the balance of European power
relations through dynastic unions – were the principle considerations’ of Dekker’s
war writings. That is, to Dekker it was the ordinary implications of war, rather
than war’s international, political ramifications, that preoccupied him. To this I
would add that Dekker not only represented war’s effects on ordinary citizens to
give these multiple perspectives a voice, but that part of how he did so was by
acknowledging the emotional cost of warfare on ordinary people and the toll war
took on the emotional quality of people’s lives.
Conclusion
For Dekker, war tropes, along with other catastrophic events such as the plague,
served as means to explore subject matters perennially preoccupying him. Perfectly
fitting the turbulence of his times, war was one of Dekker’s themes – although
not his only choice of themes – to scrutinise certain social and emotional features
of the early modern world. That war became a way to comment on social practices
and uncertainty with life in early modern London is not surprising given how easy
it is for war to act as a lightning rod for social, cultural and emotional anxieties.
Within these texts several themes are repeated. The emotional cost of warfare, the
fate of returning injured soldiers, and the deceit and falsity that war encouraged
in men and women are all identified and reflected upon through different story
arcs. Plays such as The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600) emphasised the consequences of
warfare on honest merchants, the damage war caused to personal (romantic) and
domestic relationships and the injustices of war. The plight of soldiers was also
noticed in Warres, Warres, Warres (1628), a text that finds Dekker at his most
explicit in talking about the paradox of war. The Seven Deadly Sinnes (1606) and
A Worke for Armourers (1609) display a keen attention to current events on the
Continent. War writings such as A Meeting of Gallants (1604) focused on war
and plague in a fictional register through a dialogue between War, Famine and
Pestilence. Allegory was also used in A Worke for Armourers to draw parallels
between an allegorical city under siege and London. In the midst of such turbulence
Dekker takes care to underscore the costs of war but also its ambiguities. In the
context of almost endemic warfare in Europe, fears over civil war, and debates
about England’s involvement in conflicts, Dekker’s texts draw attention to the
multifaceted nature of war and the breadth of its impact on Londoners.
Notes
1 Not all of these texts exclusively concern war. Instead, each text describes war or refers
to war or soldiers in a way that is helpful in understanding the theme of war across
Dekker’s corpus. This is not an exhaustive list: war is also tangentially referred to in
many other plays and pamphlets not mentioned here. The Wonderfull Yeare, The Ravens
Almanacke and Foure Birdes of Noah’s Arke allude to fears with war on English soil.
2 War has been analysed as a key plot device or backdrop in Dekker’s stories. Morrow
(2014) highlights how Dekker uses war to explore national and occupational identity;
Bayman (2014) gives consideration to the threat of civil war; Cañadas (2002) explores
war through the lens of interclass conflict; Lee (2015) makes connections between war
and money’s role in mercantile social cohesion.
3 Getting at the emotional reactions Dekker’s audiences may have had when reading or
hearing his work, or when going to his plays, can only be speculative, a point Escolme
(2013) raises and which Hobgood’s (2014) more extensive study of the theatre as a place
of ‘emotional practice’ still only nods towards.
4 The quotation in this chapter’s title is found on D3v.
5 This was extended with further foot and mounted soldiers after the fall of Antwerp in
the ‘treaty of increased assistance’ (Poot 2013, p. 15)
6 The text is also described as: an example of prison writing (Shaw 1947); a pamphlet on
London’s sins with an appended section on war (Bayman 2014, p. 133); a plague
pamphlet (Munro 2000); and a discussion on contemporary sins (Harris 2008).
7 Famine is a third recurring topic. See The Ravens Almanacke (1609), with Middleton in
A Meeting of Gallants (1604), The Colde Year (1614), A Rod for Run-Awayes (1625) and
Dekker and Middleton in Newes from Graves-End (1604).
8 I have elsewhere written about the economic meaning of A Worke for Armourers (Bailey
2018).
9 On whether such effects marginalised foreigners see Burke (2004); Dillon (2006) and
Kermode (2009).
10 The significance of Rafe’s gift of shoes has been explored by Kendrick (2011,
pp. 268–269).
11 In O per se O Dekker also calls for people to give alms to maimed soldiers.
12 On how attitudes to the Dutch changed in the period’s drama after the ‘Amboyna
massacre’ see Rubright (2014, pp. 212–234).
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Armourers (1609)’, English Studies, vol 99.2, pp. 1–17.
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The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–1649, Cambridge
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Holiday and Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna’, Parergon, vol. 19, pp. 119–150.
Cogswell, T. 2005, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624,
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Dekker, T. 1604, Newes from Graves-End Sent to Nobody, T[homas] C[reede] for Thomas
Archer, London.
Dekker, T. 1606, The seuen deadly sinnes of London drawne in seuen seuerall coaches, through the
seuen seuerall gates of the citie bringing the plague with them. Opus septem dierum, E[dward]
A[llde and S. Stafford] for Nathaniel Butter, London.
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yeare 1609, Printed [by Nicholas Okes] for Nathaniel Butter, London.
Dekker, T. 1625, A rod for run-awayes Gods tokens, of his feareful iudgements, sundry wayes
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Barke-shire at Bawlkin Greene neere Hatford. April. 9th. 1628 [By N. Okes] for Roger
Michell, London.
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Taylor & Francis
7
CORRESPONDING ROMANCES
Henri II and the last campaigns of
the Italian Wars
Susan Broomhall
In the last days of the Italian Wars, a conflict that had divided European states for
more than 50 years, four key political protagonists in France exchanged letters.
French campaigns against Habsburg forces in the north had separated the king,
Henri II, from his queen Catherine de’ Medici, his mistress Diane de Poitiers, the
Duchess of Valentinois, and his chief military advisor, the constable Anne de
Montmorency. During this time, four individuals whose political fates were tightly
interwoven took to letters to express their hopes, desires and fears at war. Courtly
correspondence always operated within particular rhetorical and material
conventions, and with symbolic and practical purposes. War, as this chapter argues,
not only forged a particular epistolary culture among these four individuals, but
created distinctive expressive capacity for feelings unique to their letters.
Henri’s letters were composed both as he led military campaigns away from
the court, and as campaigns separated him from his leading political advisors. The
constable Montmorency, for example, was captured at the French defeat of
the Battle of Saint-Quentin and securing his release appears a key motivation for
Henri’s negotiations of the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in August 1559, which
definitively ended the Italian Wars. As Henri’s designated regent while on
campaign, Catherine maintained, with his council, the everyday business of
government and negotiated war’s exceptional demands for military provisions and
financial support. She conducted complementary operations in the advancement
of Valois political objectives during the wars, often at a distance from her husband
(Broomhall 2018a). While these letters talk about the details of war, including
troop movements, supplies, specific actions within particular campaigns and liaisons
between military leaders, in this chapter I focus on war’s emotionally expressive
dimensions within this epistolary culture. War created opportunities for articulation
of sentiments by all four protagonists in letters. These sentiments differed not only
from each other but from the feelings expressed in other political contexts
108 Susan Broomhall
in which each of the four also wrote letters. War was not simply the context in
which these letters were produced. As this chapter argues, war was also a significant
cultural force that provided the scaffolding of feeling expression in these letters,
and more broadly, the practice and display of feelings in the courtly environment.
In particular, this chapter examines the epistolary production of feeling by the
man who was at the court’s centre, Henri II. The rhetorical expertise of early
modern elite women in the genre of letter writing is now receiving important
scholarly attention (Daybell 2001, 2006; Caine 2015; Daybell & Gordon 2016).
This includes analysis of the distinctive communicative strategies of Catherine
de’ Medici and Diane de Poitiers (Crawford 2001, 2004; McCartney 2005; Crouzet
2008; Gellard 2015; Broomhall 2018b). By contrast, the extensive correspondence
of, and between, Henri II and Anne de Montmorency has primarily served as key
evidence in analyses of their military and political achievements (Decrue 1885;
Baumgartner 1988; Rentet 2011). Only recently have scholars begun to consider
the wealth of correspondence produced in the course of these responsibilities for
its textual and epistolary insights (Pardanaud 2006). Feelings were also percept-
ible in the material qualities of the letters’ exchanges among these protagonists –
autograph components, and postscript additions among them – in ways that both
reflected and actively shaped relationships. Although we may never know whether
or how Henri and his correspondents experienced the feelings that they expressed,
we can fruitfully consider how the articulation of certain feelings in precise
ways to particular individuals within the letter form was designed to achieve
political effect in a time of war. These were political statements, but that did not
mean they were not lived experiences. Furthermore, these epistolary emotional
behaviours of individuals at war require us to investigate further the expression of
sentiments between ruling men and their subordinates, and as they were declared
to male and female recipients in an intimate circle.
Catherine, ‘my friend’

From the beginning of his reign, Henri II pursued an aggressive military policy
designed to regain some of the territory and much of the French pride lost under
the ill-fated campaigns of his father, François I. Moreover, Henri keenly desired
to participate personally at the battlefront. On the occasions where he toured
newly acquired territories in Piedmont in July 1548, or led French campaigns on
the Rhine and the northern France in the summers of 1552, 1553, 1554 and 1557,
Henri delegated his wife, Catherine de’ Medici, to head his council and manage
his affairs.
This generated an exchange of letters between husband, wife and Henri’s
senior councillor at the front, Montmorency. Catherine had long sought to culti-
vate Montmorency as an ally soon after her arrival at the French court. Although
he had been disgraced under François I in 1541, Catherine evidently perceived
the senior stateman’s powerful influence over her young and impressionable
husband. She encouraged Montmorency to form a close-knit relationship with her
Henri II and the Italian wars 109
and to ‘no longer write to me in ceremony for you know well that you need not
do that for me’, and assuring him that he ‘had no better friend, male or female’
(La Ferrière-Percy 1880, pp. 3 n3; 6).1 In return, she regularly expressed anxiety
for Henri’s health and wellbeing, a sign of her wifely devotion. While on campaign
with Montmorency in Avignon in August 1536, Henri had fallen from his horse,
and Catherine anxiously asked Montmorency for more information (La Ferrière-
Percy 1880, p. 3). After the French defeat at Thérouanne and Hesdin in July 1553,
in which a significant number of France’s noblemen had been taken prisoner
(including Montmorency’s eldest son François), Catherine more than once
expressed fears to Montmorency about Henri’s personal safety, ‘as a wife and as a
person who will have nothing’ should Henri be killed or kidnapped (La Ferrière-
Percy 1880, p. 78).2
In these letters to Montmorency at the frontline, Catherine’s devotion was not
only to her husband’s wellbeing. She also repeatedly insisted upon her dedication
to performing reliably as Henri’s regent and her dependency on their approval of
her actions: ‘I will not be easy until I know that King and you are content’ (La
Ferrière-Percy 1880, p. 56).3 She wrote explicitly of her growing political education:
My compère, you will see by the letter that I wrote to the King that I lost no
time in learning the state and charge of a munitionnaire; so that if each does
his duty to hold and observe what he promised, I assure you that I am going
to be a past mistress of this; for from one hour to the next I study nothing
but this.
(La Ferrière-Percy 1880, p. 56)4
In return, Montmorency regularly assured Catherine that her letters were a ‘thing
from which I am sure he [Henri] will receive great contentment, as also I know
that he has with all that you have done until now in the charge that he has left to
you’ (Ribier 1666, p. 414).5 But Montmorency evidently also saw Catherine’s
successful political interventions as a potential threat to his own power as an
advisor to the king. He warned Catherine not to over-reach her power in the last
days of her regency before the king’s return.
Madame, because I know that the thing in the world that you desire the
most is to satisfy only the King, I did not want to be remiss, for the old and
devoted service and obedience that I hold for you, in warning you that it
seems to me, as the King is so close to you, that you must not enter into
any expense nor make any ordonnances without first letting him know
about it and knowing his pleasure.
(Ribier 1666, p. 414)6
Significantly, the senior counsellor made the couple’s feelings for each other
the basis for offering his warning for Catherine to restrain any personal ambitions
of power.
110 Susan Broomhall
Montmorency’s fears about Catherine’s insertion into an intimate political

circle around the king had some foundation. In addition to her exchange of lettters
with the constable, the king was also directly communicating with Catherine,
whom he addressed as ‘the Queen my wife’, ‘My Friend’ (Ribier 1666, p. 415).7
Henri’s direct correspondence with Catherine was far less frequent than that she
received from Montmorency or that Henri wrote to the constable. These were
by and large practical missives seeking to secure his immediate needs for supplies
or tactical support at the front. However, Henri carefully framed his requests for
Catherine’s assistance with consideration of her feelings, strategically sensible since
she was his voice before the council. In his phrasing, Henri conveyed respect for
and acknowledgement of Catherine’s skills to operate on his behalf. When he
required further supplies at camp, he asked Catherine to intervene with his council:
‘I beg you, My Friend, to . . . make known my intention’ and assured her that he
was grateful for her support of his requests, ‘it being impossible, as I knew, that
you could have done more about it than you have’ (Ribier 1666, p. 415).8 He
delegated diplomatic responsibilities to her, sending away foreign envoys from the
frontline to address Catherine on his behalf at the court (La Ferrière-Percy, p. 60).
Henri wrote supportively of Catherine’s abilities, assuming positive benefits from
her interventions and increasingly he explicitly delegated diplomatic interviews
to her decision. Of one audience with Ferdinand de Saint Severino, prince of
Salerno (1507–1568), Henri concluded his advice by assuring Catherine ‘you
know well how to add other good remonstrances . . . tell me straightaway what
you can draw from him’ (Ribier 1666, p. 416).9 Henri’s letter to his wife evoked
a partnership founded on respect for Catherine’s intellectual capacity and his
support for her political development. That this was understood by political
colleagues is reflected in Montmorency’s warnings for Catherine not to overstep
her delegated and temporary authority. These letters between Catherine, her
husband and his leading statesman, Montmorency, made the queen’s ostensibly
fragile emotional state central to their discourse, in which Catherine’s feelings
were fashioned as responsive to Henri’s personal safety in the military conflict and
to his happiness with her actions.
Honest love and chivalric romance: Diane

The correspondence that Catherine exchanged with Henri and Montmorency at
the battlefront shared characteristics of coupling demands for assistance regarding
her husband’s political goals with explicit rhetorical attention to Catherine’s
emotional state. By contrast, distinct vocabularies of feeling shaped by a courtly
culture steeped in contemporary literary conventions of chivalric prose romance
permeated the exchange of missives between Henri, Montmorency and the king’s
longstanding partner, Diane de Poitiers, Duchess of Valentinois. Here, expression
of sentiments was primarily the privilege of Henri, but the experience of strong
feelings was acknowledged and implicitly underpinned epistolary discussions.
As he did with Catherine, Henri addressed Diane as ‘my friend’; his concerns
for her health creating an informal, quasi-domestic context for their discussions.
However, his autograph letters of absence from Diane were filled with explicit
expressions of longing, service and duty to his lady. ‘I beg you to send me news
of your health, for the pain that I’m in to have heard of your illness’, Henri wrote.
‘For if you continue to be ill, I would not hesitate to go to you to be able to be
FIGURE 7.1 Autograph letter from Henri II to Diane de Poitiers [nd]. Bibliothèque
nationale de France, manuscrit français 3143, fol 2r.
112 Susan Broomhall
of service to you, as I am bound to, and because it is not possible to live so long
without seeing you’ (BNF ms fr 3143, fol. 2r).10 From the first years of his reign,
Henri's epistolary expression fashioned an identity as an attentive and subordinate
partner, eager to please – a position that a man of power could willingly adopt
and express by choice. ‘Being distant from she from whom depends all my
wellbeing, it is impossible for me to be happy’ (BNF ms fr 3143, fol. 2r, Fig 1.).11
Upon hearing of her improved health, Henri wrote gratefully for her response: ‘
I cannot live without you, if you only know the little leisure that I have here, you
would have pity on me’ (BNF ms fr 3143, fol. 5r).12 In such letters, as with those
of Catherine, discussion of emotional states was central. Here, however, the king
coupled discussion of his duties to kingdom and government with explicit
attestations of his passion.
The combination of explicit expression of the king’s feelings, and in particular
his longing and concerns to be remembered by his loved one, likewise occupied
Henri’s letters at war. In May 1552, Henri was encamped at Wallerfangen as part
of an alliance of convenience, the Treaty of Chambord, with German Protestants
against Emperor Charles V. From there he penned a short missive to ‘Madame my
friend’. He begged Diane ‘to imagine how beautiful and well disciplined my army
is’ and hoped that she would have in her thoughts ‘he who has never known
but one God and one friend’. Suffering the exile of war, Henri went further,
assuring Diane that ‘I have no shame in giving myself the name of servant, [a role]
that I beg you will keep me in as always’ (BNF ms fr 2991, fol. 9r).13 Some years
later, in August 1558, from the French camp at Pierrepont, the tenor of Henri’s
war correspondence to Diane was unchanged. He acknowledged her expected
interest in the conflict, indicating that the courier would provide her with all the
details of their most recent developments. The letter itself was thus devoted to
the ways in which Diane’s love made his war service possible. She had sent her
royal lover a simple gift. Henri expressed his ‘hope to be worthy of being able
to wear the scarf that you sent me’ (BNF ms fr 3143, fol. 3r).14 In exchange, Henri
enclosed a ring: ‘I beg you always to remember he who has never loved nor will
ever love any but you. I beg you, my friend, to willingly wear this ring for love of
me’ (BNF ms fr 3143, fol. 3r).15 These may have been simply keepsakes of a loving
couple separated by war and the possibility of death, but Henri had rendered them
central to his military offensive for France.
Moreover, Henri signed each of these letters to Diane with a particular device
(Figure 7.1), an uppercase H that embedded two back-to-back uppercase Ds. This
was a symbol that he used widely from the time he became dauphin in 1536. The
interlaced letters could be read as an H and C for Henri and his wife Catherine.
However, most contemporaries understood the device to represent the partnership
of Henri and Diane, as did an eyewitness attending the introduction of Venetian
ambassador Giovanni Capello to the king at the Louvre, who observed that the
king’s apparel was embroidered,
with two gold crescents fashioned in a manner to seem to be two Ds. In

this interweaving of Ds, one can see first an H, the initial of the name of
His Majesty, then also an E, the second letter of the same name, Henri. One
can also see two Ds, which are the double initials of the Duchess of
Valentinois, also called madame la Sénéchale. Her real name is Diane and
the allusion is clear in these two crescents so united and joined by the
embrace of the two Ds. Thus are, in effect, the souls of the two lovers united
and reunited in a close bond.
(Baschet 1862, p. 443)16
Certainly, it was a device that Henri used only in his letters to Diane but never
for those to his wife, Catherine.
Nonetheless, Catherine supported the convenient fiction that the symbol
represented her own partnership with the king. She was depicted wearing the
symbol while dauphine and queen (Quentin-Bauchart 1891, pp. 185–188). Likewise,
she tolerated Diane’s position as a senior figure in her immediate entourage. This
position enabled Diane to write openly of her proximity to power, providing
news of the movements of the royal couple to a range of interlocutors. Ostensibly
for her particular services to the queen, Henri even rewarded Diane with a gift of
5500 livres (Guiffrey 1866, pp. 78–79). Diane’s assistance to the queen, like the
queen’s share in the HD/HC symbol, was widely understood to be a fiction;
nevertheless, these were narratives considered vital to the stability and morality of
the court as a whole.
These outward presentations of the nature of the relationship between Henri,
Diane and Catherine were made possible by a courtly culture energetically enacting
a practice derived from contemporary prose romance. The popularity of translated
chivalric literature from Spain and Italy, most notably the long-running blockbuster
Amadís de Gaule, was at its height during the reign of François I and his son Henri.
Such texts promoted concepts of chaste love and devotion to a single lady for
whom a servant knight or prince could overcome all manner of obstacles,
interspersed with masculine comraderie developed through acts of bravery and
courage in military service. Significantly for its pertinence to Henri’s emotional
relationships, the protagonist, Amadís, consummates his relationship with his lover
outside the conventions of formalised marriage. Translated editions of successive
volumes were immensely popular both at court and among a wider reading
populace during the 1540s and 1550s (Baret 1853; Bourciez 1886; Rothstein
1994; Cazauran 2000; Bideaux 2005). Ambitious translators and publishers saw a
ready connection to the king’s twinned interests of love and war, dedicating
volumes to his senior military advisor Anne de Montmorency and to his companion
Diane de Poitiers.
Indeed, translators argued strongly to the reading public the value of these
books in teaching moral and military codes of feeling. In a prefatory poem to Book
8 of Amadís, translated by Nicolas de Herberay, sieur des Essarts, and dedicated to
Montmorency, Michel Sevin suggests that the work ‘praises those who, with right
courage, love the love that leads to marriage’ (de Herberay 1548, sig. Aiiir).17 The
epic, Sevin emphasised, could provide courtly readers with instruction in love and
war: ‘It also treats love and feat of arms, representing knights and men of arms, who
114 Susan Broomhall
love with an honest love, and yet are strong and chivalrous, for this novel brings
together Mars and Venus’ (de Herberay 1548, sigs. Aiiiiv–vr).18 Jacques Gohory’s
translation of Book 11 and Gullaume Aubert’s of Book 12, both dedicated to
Diane de Poitiers, continued the story of the hero Agesilan de Colchos, ‘in the
long pursuit of the love of Diane, the most beautiful princess in the world’, with
hinted correspondences between the fictive palace of Diane and Diane de Poitiers’s
château of Anet (Gohory 1554; Gorris 2000).19 In his address to readers, Aubert
argued that the power of the work resided in the purety and simplicity of its
language, and its enjoyment of what ‘the extremes of love could do to people’.
Readers could ‘see the experience of military art, be spurred to arms through the
praise of prowess and by the rebuke of cowardice, contemplate . . . diverse changes
in fortune, the inconstance of human things and the luck of war’ (Aubert 1556,
sig. Aiiiir).20 In the eyes of their translators, these works could reflect lived and
desirable emotional experiences at court – honest love, courage and bravery.
Moreover, these publications also fostered nationalistic sentiment for the current
French campaigns of the Italian Wars. Herberay’s translations of Amadís were
lauded for adapting ‘primitive’ Spanish into the ‘gentle, ornate, orderly and rich’
language of France (de Herberay 1540, sig. Aiiv).21 The translations of Spanish and
Italian epics were justified as cultural appropriations that reflected and aided the
French war effort (Cooper 1990, p. 197). A poetic dedication to François I in
1543, repurposed as equally appropriate to the hawkish Henri in the 1555 edition
of Book 4, promised that ‘you will see here, Sire, how with great happiness your
Amadís knew so well how to pursue his enemies, that he defeated the Emperor’
(de Herberay 1543; 1555, sig. Aiir).22 In his contribution, Gohory likened Henri
to Julius Caesar who had also, with his ‘warring legions and the French forces with
their great military discipline, reduced the Empire to his obedience’ (Gohory
1554, sig. Aiiv).23 Translation itself thus became a form of conquering act. ‘It is
certain’, wrote Michel le Clerc, for de Herberay’s Book 1 translation in 1540, ‘that
Spain knows well that in this matter, France has the advantage in speaking
beautifully, as much as in good conduct’ (de Herberay 1540, sig. Aiir).24 That
contemporaries mocked as unreal the outdated forms of war that were represented
in these texts does not mean that they held less meaning as practised, or simply
ideal, models of feeling codes for the court, and in particular its king (Cooper
1990, p. 191). Indeed, Aubert drew a line between the protagonist Princess Diane
and her dedicatee Diane de Poitiers that paralleled contemporary Franco-Spanish
military rivalries, arguing that ‘the heavenly destinies . . . wanted the history of
your perfections to be known by the Spanish before your birth’ but ‘discovered
by the French in your lifetime’ (Aubert 1556, sig. Aiir).25 These sixteenth-century
chivalric interpretations of both love and war were, I argue, enacted in Henri’s
letters to Diane from the battlefront that voiced the devotion of a warrior-king-
servant for his distant, beloved lady.
Henri’s missives even drew upon the works of contemporary French poets who
had been inspired by popular prose romances. In one letter to Diane that the king
likely composed from the war front in 1552, he copied out a sonnet by Joachim
du Bellay, first published in his collection imbued with Neoplatonic themes,

L’Olive, in 1549. Du Bellay’s poem was inspired by Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando
Furioso, a work that itself underwent some 11 French editions during the period
(Hope 1982; Cooper 1990, p. 234). This sonnet was coupled with three other
verses, perhaps of Henri’s own invention, adopting Petrarchan motifs, lamenting
his departure and submitting his heart to her protection (BNF ms fr 3143, fols.
6–9r). War and the romance of his honest love for Diane went hand in hand for
Henri. In fact, war was part of the chivalric romance that Henri was constructing
as his emotional experience in these letters.
The king’s ‘honest love’ for Diane, his lady, both mirrored and constructed
through its relationship to contemporary chivalric romance, was itself stimulated
by the context of Henri’s campaigns within the Italian Wars. That the king’s love
was of a particular, honest and discreet kind was vital for the moral functioning
of the court. Histoire de Primaleon de Grece likened its hero’s ‘chivalry and courtesy’
to that of Henri himself (Vernassal 1550, sig. Aivv).26 A hallmark of the Amadís
series, as Gohory opined in his introduction to Book 10, was that it served as an
ideal introduction to youth at court as ‘an example and model of chivalry, courtesy
and discretion, which lifts their hearts to virtue, teaching them the acts which they
must follow or avoid’ (Gohory 1552, sig. Aiiir).27 Chivalry of the kind these
romances advanced demanded discretion.
Chivalry also demanded the co-operation of Henri’s acknowledged female
partners, Catherine and Diane. Within this framework of chivalric discretion,
Henri’s further dalliances, even those that led to illegitimate children, as with
Italian Filippa Duci, Nicole de Savigny and Jane Stewart, could be managed
within the courtly culture. But indiscretion could not be tolerated. The widowed
Scotswoman Stewart, Lady Fleming, governess to the young Mary Queen of Scots
and dauphine of France, for example, boasted too broadly of her relationship with
the monarch, which resulted in the birth of a son, Henri, in 1551, and was soon
sent back to Scotland. Many years later, Catherine de’ Medici reflected on uxorial
and courtly discretion in Henri’s day, emphasising the importance of courtly
protocols and appropriate emotional demeanours.
I had the honour to have married the King my lord . . . but the thing that
annoyed him the most was when he knew that I knew of such things; and
when Madame de Fleming was pregnant, he found it very good when she
was sent away
(Baguenault de Puchesse 1901, p. 36)28
Indeed, she called upon the example of the more subtle behaviour of Diane de
Poitiers, in order to make her point. ‘With Madame de Valentinois, it was, as with
Madame d’Estampes [Anne de Pisseleu, mistress of François I], most honourable,
but those who were so silly as to disrupt things he [Henri] would have been very
annoyed if I had retained them close to me’ (Baguenault de Puchesse 1901,
p. 36).29 Catherine stressed the importance of repressing visible affective display
116 Susan Broomhall
about affairs of the heart, and their consequences, for the political and social
stability of the court.
Discretion was one half of the courtly chivalric romance fiction that Henri
imposed; emotional discipline was the other. Many years after the deaths of both
Henri and Diane, Catherine reflected upon her emotional experiences at the court
of her husband. ‘If I made good cheer for Madame de Valentinois, it was the King
who I was really entertaining . . . for never did a woman who loved her husband
succeed in loving his whore. For one cannot call her otherwise, although the word
is a horrid one to us’ (Baguenault de Puchesse 1901, p. 181).30 Henri’s version of
chivalric romantic culture at court, which was practised in his correspondence at
war, demanded considerable emotional discipline and discretion from others.
No letters of Diane to Henri have yet been uncovered to reveal her views.
Perhaps the chivalry of the king extended to destroying missives that could
potentially compromise his partner. However, those that Diane composed for
other men within his military forces make clear, explicitly so, her intimate
knowledge of the course of the war and the king’s movements. War offered Diane
the opportunity to use her correspondence with far-flung servants to the king to
offer herself as a mediator between them and Henri. She assured those on campaign
that she could employ her physical and emotional proximity to the monarch to
remind the king of their important contribution (Broomhall, 2018b). Letters
to Henri’s trusted advisor and her political rival Montmorency, however, required
particular care. In August 1547, Diane had wed her younger daughter, Louise de
Brézé, into the dynasty that was Montmorency’s rival, the Guise family. While
the Guise favoured a continuation of aggressive campaigns during the late 1550s,
the defeat of the French troops and Montmorency’s capture at Saint-Quentin had
convinced Henri of the value of peace negotiations with Philip II. Diane thus
astutely expanded her allegiances at court. Her letters to the imprisoned constable
now reflected her ‘hope’ that Montmorency’s negotiations would see the stateman
return to influence at court (Guiffrey 1866, p. 155). She began to seek a marriage
of her grand-daughter, Antoinette de la Marck, to Montmorency’s second son,
Henri I, Duke of Damville, in June 1558.
However, in March 1559, Montmorency was to receive a significant letter that
revealed as much through its material qualities as its content (Figure 7.2). Diane
commenced the short missive to the captive statesmen with thanks for his most
recent news. Then the quill was taken over by Henri, who continued by thanking
him for writing in his own hand at such a busy time during the peace talks. He then
concluded that ‘the secretary who has completed half of my letter and me recom-
mend ourselves to your good grace’, with Diane completing the main letter text by
wishing God’s blessing upon their recipient. Henri scrawled the complimentary
close, ‘Your longstanding & best friends’, before each author penned their own
name (BNF ms fr 3139, fol. 26r).31 (Figure 7.2) This remarkable letter interspersing
the voice and penmanship of the king and his partner clearly signalled the intimate
nature of their relationship and the power of Diane’s access and reach into the king’s
affairs. There could be no minsunderstanding by Montmorency of Diane’s power.
FIGURE 7.2 Autograph letter from Henri II and Diane de Poitiers to Anne de
Montmorency [1559] Bibliothèque nationale de France, manuscrit
français 3139, fol. 26r.
118 Susan Broomhall
Brotherly love: Anne de Montmorency

But why had Diane been driven to such a course of action, whether the double
letter was her idea or an idea of Henri’s that she had accepted? Henri’s war
correspondence with Montmorency had revealed some startling information,
principally in terms of how Henri addressed the elder courtly figure. The emotional
rhetoric of Henri’s letters during the campaigns, coupled with his political response
to Montmorency’s capture, suggested a powerful bond of feeling between themen,
one that appeared to threaten the affective supremacy of his longstanding partner,
if not his wife.
Montmorency had risen under François I to the supreme position of the French
army as constable, and had a demonstrated record of military achievement,
particularly in crushing imperial forces in Provence. However, he had found
himself at odds with another royal mistress, Anne de Pisseleu, soon after and had
been exiled from court. With Henri’s accession to the throne, and a renewed
emphasis on pursuing conflict against the Emperor, Montmorency had been recalled
to the court and his former position. He campaigned with Henri, and as demon-
strated above, regularly corresponded for the king with senior court members,
including the queen. Catherine had identified the strong influence of Montmorency
early on in her marriage and had attempted to forge a close connection with
a figure who could potentially provide an alliance against Diane de Poitiers. When
they were apart, Henri’s letters intermingled directions about the campaign with
his concerns for Montmorency’s safety and his desire to share the experience of war
with his friend (BNF ms fr 3129, fol. 8r).32 In the spring and summer of 1554, for
example, Henri concluded one letter by begging Montmorency: ‘keep yourself
well that you do not fall ill, for you would make me die’ (BNF ms fr 3129,
fol. 4r).33 Another repeated the phrasing, ‘praying that you look after yourself, so
that you do not fall ill, and remember the person in this world who loves you the
most and who will forever remain, if you please, your good compère and friend’
(BNF ms fr 3129, fol. 12r).34 Henri requested in a post-script that Montmorency
should destroy these letters so that no one could see them (BNF ms fr 3129,
fol. 12r). Montmorency, like Diane, did not. Henri’s use of the word ‘conpere’
(compère) was a sign of their spiritual kinship, for Henri was the godfather of Anne’s
son, Henri, who would later marry Diane de Poitiers’s grand-daughter (Brantôme
1864, p. 331).
In August 1557, after the collapse of the truce of Vaucelles that had been signed
between Henri and Philip II in February 1556, Montmorency took the head of
the army at Saint-Quentin. Here, the French were resoundingly defeated and the
constable captured. Henri’s undated letters from this period continued to express
longing for the older man: ‘telling you that my greatest desire in all the world is
to see you happy again’ (BNF ms fr 3139, fol. 14r).35 Henri’s words of comfort as
a ‘good and loyal friend’ were no mere complimentary close; the negotiations that
concluded the Italian Wars were shaped by the king’s feelings for Montmorency.36
Lamenting their distance, Henri assured his friend and councilor: ‘as to my health,
I have no ease or contentment since it pleases God that I am away from you. I
beg you to believe nothing else in this world could ever divert me from the
friendship that I hold for you’ (BNF ms fr 3139, fol. 1r).37 This was the language
of a chivalric, quasi-romantic attachment between brothers at arms. It mirrored
the language and tone of the set pieces of rhetoric within the Amadís series. These
texts were so popular that the key speeches of the first 12 books of Amadís were
gathered together in a treasury in 1559 (Benhaïm 2000). Their compiler assured
readers that they could be of particular value as tools of epistolary expression, ‘as
much for familiar as all sorts of missives’ (Thresor 1560, sig. A1v).
As part of the process for Montmorency’s ransom and the ongoing negotiations
for a peace between the warring monarchs, Montmorency was released on parole
to communicate with the king. Henri begged him to ‘hurry as soon as you can so
that I can enjoy seeing you again, not being able to live without you’ (BNF ms
fr 3139, fol. 3r).38 Contemporaries observed in Henri’s actions what they could
not have read in his intimate letters – a strong emotional bond and familiarity
between the men. When in October 1558, Montmorency was released to visit the
king at Beauvais, Henri came to meet him hat in hand and held the constable in
an embrace lasting minutes, in full view of witnesses including the Ferrarese
ambassador Julio Alvarotti who understood from the gesture the full extent of
Montmorency’s influence. The men then retired, the king sharing his bed for the
next two nights with Montmorency (Romier 1913, p. 301). The constable was
back just two weeks later in early November, attending the king, queen and Diane
at court and the wedding of eleven-year-old Claude de Valois, the king’s daughter,
to Charles III, Duke of Lorraine, in early January 1559. The Venetian ambassador
Giovanni Michieli reported that Henri had Montmorency sit at his table, next to
his master, and had arranged a bed for the older man ‘in the wardrobe next to his
chamber, continuing more than ever to bestow favours on him in public and in
private’ (Romier 1913, p. 310).39 By mid-February Montmorency was again with
Henri, at Villers-Cotterêts, before returning again in early March. With each visit
enabling the advancement of the peace treaty negotiations, the two men were
never long out of each other’s company.
But loss and longing at a time of war were relative. Between these encounters,
Henri and Montmorency exchanged letters. Some contained practical points of
negotiation, but details were more commonly left to his envoys, making Henri’s
epistolary space one for expression of particular feelings. Upon one occasion of
Montmorency’s return to Habsburg captivity, Henri wrote at length:
My friend, this letter will serve that which I could not do when I said
goodbye to you, for my heart was so broken that it was impossible to say
anything to you. I beg you to believe that you are the person in the world
that I love the most, and for all that, I know nothing to offer you, for, since
my heart is yours, I think that you know well that I would spare nothing I
own or nothing in my power to have the happiness to see you again.
(BNF ms fr 3139, fol. 16r)40
120 Susan Broomhall
The king’s haste to see Montmorency return was repeatedly expressed across
multiple letters: ‘My friend, I don’t know how to speak of the regret that I have
to be separated from you without doing anything . . . I beg you to excuse me if
I importune you too much about your ransom, but my desire to see you makes
me do it.’ (BNF ms fr 3139, fol. 20r).41 Henri’s feelings also gave power to the
Habsburg negotiators, particularly in driving up the price of Montmorency’s
freedom. For, as Henri wrote: ‘nothing but death could separate me from you,
I would think myself happy and would die content when I see a good peace and
the man whom I love and esteem most in the world, and so do not be afraid to
set the ransom at any price, for I will spare nothing that is in my power to see
you again’ (BNF ms fr 3139, fol. 5r).42
Henri’s letters to Montmorency were embedded in a specific courtly rhetoric
of chivalric warfare that prioritised brotherhood forged in shared combat and
which allowed for intense emotional expression. An enormous sum was the final
price of this friendship and Montmorency’s permanent release, in addition to the
signing of the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis that ended the Italian Wars permanently,
a deeply unpopular resolution to the conflict among many in France. However,
as a dedicatory poem in Book 8 of Amadís had suggested to Montmorency in
1548, if the prose romances taught the captain sent to war how to willingly
acquire honour and glory, it also instructed ‘the Prince how to govern himself so
well as to long reign in peace’ (de Herberay 1548, sig. Aiiiv).43 And, as Jacques
Gohory had suggested to Henri’s sister, Marguerite, in his dedication of Book 10
to her in 1552, after war come ‘the good alliances and marriages of Princes and
Princesses’, just so was Marguerite married in June 1559 to Emanuel Philibert of
Savoy (1528–1580), the Emperor’s ally who had routed Montmorency at Saint-
Quentin in 1557 (Gohory 1552, sig. aiiir).44
Conclusions
Letters exchanged between Henri, Catherine, Diane and Montmorency, written
in the context of the last campaigns of the Italian Wars, demonstrate how that
military context offered new political opportunities and alliances that were expressed
in a specific, gendered language of care, concern, friendship and love within the
epistolary genre. These letters also articulated crucial understandings about the
nature of war; specifically, about the feeling rules of war itself. The context of war
– or rather, a particular view of chivalric military engagement practised by the
mid-sixteenth-century French court – enabled Henri to articulate strong sentiments
of passion in his letters. His emotional expression functioned within a specific
courtly culture in which the knight errant/king could earn the favour of his
treasured lady and signify a bond of brotherhood with fellow men through acts of
bravery in military conflict.
The key protagonists of this epistolary exchange may have been exchanging
missives about feelings in war, but it did not mean that the emotional expression
made available to them in this ‘romance’ or their articulation of particular affective
experiences was ‘corresponding’. The rules of war’s emotions in this cultural

milieu were dependent on both gender and status in the hierarchy of the court.
By right of his status, Henri held the power to articulate feeling about and through
war in his letters – love, loss, longing, a sense of exile from his most cherished
supporters. Others too spoke of their sentiments, such as his consort Catherine,
but the expressive capability and range of female-authored letters to men at the
battlefront was far more limited. The rules of chivalric romance did not voice
female passion for male partners, and accordingly neither Catherine nor Diane
openly articulated passionate love for a male partner in times of war. Rather,
Catherine’s epistolary expression of fears, primarily concerns for the emotional and
physical wellbeing of a loved one in danger, implied her uxorial emotional duties.
Nor did the feeling rules of courtly romance legitimise the objects of male
affection, in this case both Diane and Montmorency, to voice a response or
reciprocation to his sentiments in the epistolary form, either because they could
not be expressed in that format, or because they could not be left for the eyes of
others.
Notes
1 [nd] ‘ne m’esecripvié pleus en syrimonye, car vous savés byen que se net pas à moy à
quy l’an fo fère’, La Ferrière 1880, 3, n.3; [June 1543], ‘vous n’avés pount de mylleures
amys ne amye’, La Ferrière 1880, 6. ‘et qui set quindé afoler’, La Ferrière 1880, 3.
2 [15–20] August 1553, ‘en femme et an personne qui n’ayra rien’.
3 20 May [1552], ‘j’espère que le tout bien acheminé et estably, comme il est, vous en
serez satisfait . . . n’y perdray point ma peine jusques à ce que je sçache comme le Roy
et vous en serez contens’.
4 ‘Mon compère, vous verrez par la lecture que j’escris au Roy que ie n’a pas perdu temps
à apprendre l’estat et charge de munitionnaire; en quoy si chacun fait son devoir de tenir
et observer ce qu’il a promis, je vous asseure que je m’en vais maistresse passé; car
d’heure à autre je n’estudie que cela’.
5 30 May 1552, ‘chose dont ie suis seur qu’il receura grand contentement, comme aussi
connois-je qu’il a de tout ce que vous auez fait jusques – icy en la charge qu’il vous auoit
laissée’.
6 30 May 1552, ‘Madame, pource que ie sçay que la chose du monde que vous desirez le
plus, est de satisfaire seulement au Roy, ie n’ay voulu manquer, pour l’ancienne &
devote servitude & obeissance que ie vous porte, vous advertir qu’il me semble, estant
ledit Seigneur si prochain de vous, qu’il sera doresnavant, que vous ne devez entrer en
aucune despense, ny plus faire ordonnance d’aucuns deniers, sans premierement le luy
faire sçauoit & entendre son bon plaisir’.
7 8 June 1552, ‘à la Reyne ma Femme’, ‘ma mie’.
8 ‘ie vous prie, Ma Mie, ordonner aux gens de mon Conseil, auquel vous ferez à tous
entendre mon intention, qu’ils ayent à ne vaquer à autre chose’, ‘estant impossible,
comme j’ay sçeu, que vous y’eussiez plus fait que vous auez’.
9 ‘& autres bonnes remonstrances que vous y sçaurez bien adjouster, . . . & de ce que vous
pourez tirer de luy, vou s m’aduertirez incontinent’.
10 [1547] ‘Mamye Je vous suplye de me mander de vre santé, pour la poyne anquoy je suys
davoyr antandu vre maladye afyn que sellon sella je me gouuerne car sy vous contynuyes
a vous trouuer mal je ne voulderoys fallyr la vous aler trouver pour mestre poyne de
vous fayre servyse selon que je i suys tenu et ausy quy ne me feroyt posyble de vyvere
sy longuemant sans vous voyr’.
122 Susan Broomhall
11 ‘vous asure que je ne sere a mon ayse que se porteur ne soyt de retour . . . le peu de
plesyr que jare a fontenebleau sans vous voyr car estant ellongne de sele de quy depant
tout mon byen il est bien malese que je puysse avoyr joye’.
12 [1547] ‘je ne puys vyvere sans vous et sy vous sauyes le peu de pasetans que je isy vous
aryes pytyé de moy’.
13 [May 1552] ‘Madame mamye . . . je vous suplye de panser que mon armee est belle et
an boune voulante . . . je vous suplye avoyr souvenanse de seluy qui na james counu
que ung dyu et une amye et vous asurer que nares point de honte de mavoyr doune le
non de servyteur lequel je vous suplye me conserver pour james’.
14 ‘estre dyne de pouuoyr porter lescharpe que maves anvoye’.
15 ‘je vous suplye avoyr toujours souuenanse de seluy quy na james ayme ny nemera james
que vous . . . je vous suplye mamie vouloyr porter set bague pour lamour de moy’.
16 ‘de deux croissants d’or accommodés de manière à sembler être entre deux D. Dans cet
enlacement des D, on voit d’abord un H, intiiale du nom de Sa Majesté: on voit aussi
un E, seconde lettre du même nom de Henri; on y peut voir aussi deux D; lesquesl sont
la double initiales de la duchesse de Valentinois, appelée aussi madame la Sénéchale. Son
vrai nom est Diane, et l’allusion est bien manifeste dans ces deux croissants si unis et si
joints par l’embrassement des deux D; ainso soit, en effet, les deux âmes des deux
amants, unies et réunies dans un étroit attachement’.
17 ‘Il louë aussi ceux quie de bon courage/ Ayment d’amour tendants a mariage’.
18 ‘Il traite aussi les amours & faitz d’armes/ Representant Chevaliers & gens d’armes/ Qui
de l’honneste amour sont amoureux:/ Et toutesfois forts, & chevalereux/ Car ce
Romant assemble /Mars, & Venus’.
19 ‘au long pourchas de l’amour de Diane, la plus belle Princesse du monde’.
20 ‘en considerant que peut l’extremité de l’amour sur les humains, voir l’experience de
l’art militaire, s’encourager aux armes par la louange de la prouesse, & par la vituperation
de la couardie, contempler . . . les diuers changemens de la fortune, l’inconstance des
choses humaines, les hazards de la guerre’.
21 ‘doulx, aorné, proper, & riche’.
22 ‘Vous y verrez (Sire) que par grand heur/ Vostre Amadis sceut si tresbien poursuyvre/
Ses ennemys, qu’il deffit l’Empereur’.
23 ‘ses legions aguerries, & forces Françoises auec sa bonne discipline militaire, reduit
l’Empire à son obeissance’.
24 ‘Et soit certain qu’Espagne en cest affaire/ Cognoistra bien que France a l’aduantage/
Au bien parler autant comme au bien faire’.
25 ‘celestes destinées, qui ont voulu que l’histoire de voz perfections fust entenduë par les
Espagnolz deuant votre naissance, & descouuerte aux Françoys en vostre viuant’.
26 ‘les chevaleries et courtoisie’.
27 ‘un exemple & patron de chevalerie, courtoisie, & discretion, qui leur eleuast le cueur
à la vertu, enseignant les actes qu’ilz doivent ensuyure ou euiter’.
28 12 June 1582. ‘J’ay eu cet honneur d’avoyr espousé le Roy mon seigneur . . . mais la
chouse du monde de quoy yl estoit plus mary, c’estoit quand yl savoit que je seuse de
ces nouveles là; et, quand Madame de Flamin fut grose, yl trouva très bon quant on l’an
envoya’.
29 ‘De Madame de Valentinois, c’estèt, comme Madame d’Estampes, en tout honneur;
mais celes qui estoient si foles que d’en fayre voler les esclats, yl eust esté bien marry que
je les eusse retenues auprès de moy’.
30 25 April 1584. ‘cet je fèse bonne chère à madame de Valantynnois, c’estoyt le Roy, et
encore je luy fésèt tousjours conestre que s’étoyt à mon très grent regret: car jeamès fame
qui aymèt son mary n’éma sa puteyn; car on ne le peust apeler aultrement, encore que
le mot souyt vylayn à dyre à bous aultres’.
31 ‘la segretère quy achève la moytye de ma lestre et moy nous recoumandons a vre boune
grase’ ‘vos ansyens et mylleurs amys, henry, dianne’.
32 ‘couneses byen la grande anvie que je d’estre au canp’.
33 ‘je vous prye, garde vous byen que ne soyes malade car vous me feries mourir’.
34 ‘vous pryer vous byen garder afyn que ne soyes malade et avoyr souvenanse de la
persoune de se monde quy vous ayme le plus et quy veult a james demourer sy vous
plait vre bon conpere et amy’.
35 ‘la plus grande anuye que je aye an se monde est de vous reuoyr contant’.
36 ‘bon et leal amy’.
37 ‘quant a ma sante mes aveque peu dayse nyde contantement puys quy playt adyeu que
je soys absant et elougne de vous et vous prie de croye que nule chose de se monde ne
me saroyt detourner de lamitie que je vous porte’.
38 ‘vous depecher le plustost que poures afin que je se byen de vous voyr ne pouant vyuere
sans vous’.
39 5 November 1558. ‘preparare un letto nella guardarobba contingua alla sua camera,
continuando più che mai i favori verso di lui in pubblico et in privato’.
40 ‘Mon amy sete lestre fera lofyse que je ne peu fayre quant je vous e dyst adyeu pour
avoyr le ceur sy sere quy mestoyt inposyble de vous ryens dyre Je vous prye de croyre
que vous estes la persoune de se monde que jeme le plus et pour sela je ne vous saroys
ryens oferyr car puys que mon ceur est a vous je croy que vous panses byen que je
nepergnere mes byens ny se quy sera an ma puysanse pour avoyr set heur que de vous
ravoyr’.
41 ‘Mon amy je ne saroys vous dyre le regueret que je de vous voyr separer sans ryens fayre
. . . Je vous prye mescuser sy je vous prye mescuser sy je [sic] vous importune tant de
vre ranson mes l’anuye que je de vous voyr me le fayt fayre’.
42 ‘autre ocasyon que sele de la mort ne me saroyt separer daueque vous la quele jestimeroys
heureuse et mouroys contant quant je veroys une bonne pays et loume du monde que
jayme et estime le plus et pour sela necregnes de vous mestre à ranson à quelque pris
que se soyt car ie nepargnere chose quy soyt an ma puysanse pour vous ravoyr’.
43 ‘Au Prince enseigne à bien se gouverner/ Si longuement il veult en pais regner’.
44 ‘bons accordz & mariages des Princes & Princesses’.
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Taylor & Francis
8
BELLICOSE PASSIONS IN
MARGARET CAVENDISH’S
PLAYES (1662)
Diana G. Barnes
When Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, employed emotional terms to

justify her decision to publish, rather than stage, her Playes (1662), she positioned
her contribution within a pressing political and philosophical debate. In ‘The
Epistle Dedicatory’ to her husband William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, she
identifies the risks of performance: ‘If Envy did make a faction against them, they
would have had a publick Condemnation; and though I am not such a Coward,
as to be afraid of the hissing Serpents, or stinged Tongues of Envy, yet it would
have made me a little Melancholy to have my harmless and innocent Playes go
weeping from the Stage’ (my italics). Here Cavendish distinguishes her volume
from the kind of public discourse that incites the emotions that fuel faction, and
breed civil war. As Stephen Zwicker (1993, p. 1) reminds us, in the years
immediately following the restoration of monarchy in 1660, ‘the memory of that
lamented translation from language to arms remained vivid and potent’. The
whole historical period should be seen in these terms: David Armitage (2017,
p. 11) stresses that ‘slaughter on such a scale scythes through families, shatters
communities, shapes nations. It can scar also imaginations for centuries to come’.
All literary genres carried the collective emotional scars of war but, as Cavendish
and her contemporaries recognised, this was particularly true of drama. The public
theatres were closed by Parliament after the outbreak of civil war in 1642, and
reopened after the restoration of monarchy in 1660. By 1662 when Cavendish’s
Playes were published, drama was a literary genre, and the theatre a cultural
institution, deeply implicated in the recent experience of civil war. In choosing to
print rather than stage her dramatic works, Cavendish does not shy away from
politico-literary polemic. In post-civil-war Britain tears, print drama and the
fear, envy, shame and melancholy Cavendish associates with them had a collective
political significance as the terms of what Alexandra Bennett (2009) calls
the ‘theatre of war’. Cavendish’s Playes is an ideal focal point for considering the
128 Diana G. Barnes
relationship between war and emotion. She theorises the relationship between
civil war, emotion and theatre in the prefatory materials, while Bell in Campo, parts
1 & 2, and Loves Adventure, parts 1 & 2, directly concern war, specifically women’s
emotional roles within it.
When Cavendish writes of plays that ‘go weeping from the Stage’, tears are not
associated with a specific emotion. She cites cowardice, envy and melancholy, but
implies shame, pride and courage. As Thomas Dixon (2015, p. 7) argues, ‘A tear
[. . .] is a universal sign because, depending on the mental, social, and narrative
context, it can mean almost anything’. That is not to say that tears do mean
anything, but rather they have had a range of specific meanings at different points
in time. Nevertheless, as recent scholarship on the cultural history of emotions
shows, the broad connotative implications of tears are relevant here. First, tears
register emotion that exceeds other modes of expression, such as language and
gesture, as Tom Lutz (cited in Rambuss 2013, pp. 258–259) points out: ‘We
recognize in crying [. . .] a surplus of feeling over thinking, and an overwhelming
of our powers of articulation’. Second, tears have meaning within a community.
As Dixon (2015, p. 8) puts it: they ‘are not best thought of as expressions of
individual emotion, but rather as a kind of liquid social bond’. Third, as a social
activity, crying is gendered. Bernard Capp (2014, p. 75ff ) argues that in
seventeenth-century England the ‘elite and essentially male code’ of civility that
had largely displaced medieval courtesy constructed tears as feminine, Roman
Catholic, bestial and plebeian, that is, as the antithesis of masculine decorum,
decency and control. Dixon’s history of Englishness and tears also documents the
emergence and ascendency of a masculine emotional regime. Literature is important
to Dixon’s account: he cites Shakespearean drama as evidence for a mounting
national crisis that culminated in the English civil war and then produced lachry-
mose poetry such as Richard Crashaw’s ‘The Weeper’ (1646). Crashaw’s poem is
a good example of courtly Roman Catholic discourse adapted to address war
(Rambuss 2013, pp. 61–63), but we need to look further than this to understand
the significance of Cavendish’s invocation of weeping plays and a public divided
by factionalism.
A different emotional history emerges, however, if we foreground the complaint
and the history play, popular native English literary genres that deal in emotional
excess, and deploy it in political and gendered terms. Both draw plotlines from
chronicle history and cast them into emotion-rich and tearful, literary forms. Jean
Howard’s work on the gendering of theatrical passions, and relatedly on theatrical
tears, in history plays of the 1590s written by Thomas Heywood and William
Shakespeare is important here. In Shakespeare, while tears are often a sign of
effeminacy or weakness in a man, especially a king (Richard II), they can connote
authentic feeling (Richard Duke of York), or ruthless feigning (Shakespeare’s
Richard III). Early modern stage tears are ideologically contested, and as such they
presage a new emotional code of representation (Howard 2016). Heywood
defended the theatre in An Apology for Actors (1612), on emotional grounds,
specifically its ‘power to new mold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to
Margaret Cavendish’s Playes 129
the shape of any noble and notable attempt’. As Howard (1999, p. 136) points
out, ‘the history play was privileged as a didactic and patriotic genre’ and one
primarily focused on male heroes and male spectators, but it drew on emotional
techniques of impersonation, that is, embodiment of passion in a character, and
then transference of that passion from actor to spectator (in Heywood’s words ‘as
if the Personator were the man Personated’) derived from the complaint. The locus
classicus, Ovid’s Heroides, associated feminine emotional excess of the kind that
manifests in tears with a heroic capacity for eloquent and just defiance of oppressive
powers. This literary tradition did not depict female tears pejoratively (Helgerson
1999; Clarke 2000). Ovid’s tragic and emotional heroines had a special place in
the grammar school curriculum ‘as affecting subjects worth studying and imitating’
by men (Enterline 2012, pp. 124–139). The form and its affective techniques were
popularised in the male and female complaints of characters from English chronicle
history in The Mirror for Magistrates (1559). These poems and later male and female
historical complaints by Michael Drayton and Samuel Daniel provided playwrights
with a powerful model for emotional characterisation (Kerrigan 1991; Manley
1995; Fox 2009; Thorne 2010; Kaegi 2015). Cavendish’s Playes draws upon these
traditions.
In 1662 Cavendish had ample personal justification for tears of grief and for
tears of fear that civil war could re-erupt. Born around 1623 to a staunchly royalist
family, her formative years were dominated by the mounting civil unrest of the
1630s, the outbreak of civil war in 1640s, and the interregnum of the 1650s
(Whitaker 2002, pp. 42–60; Murphy 2012, pp. 272–273, 276). In ‘A True Relation
of my Birth, Breeding and Life’ (Cavendish Natures Pictures), she subscribes to a
causal mechanistic understanding of emotions, and presents herself as born with
a familial emotional disposition, or humour, that was honed by circumstance.
She describes her father, Thomas Lucas, as a nobleman and not a peer. As a noble,
that is, loyal, constant and upright, to his core, he ‘did not esteem titles unless they
were gained by heroic actions; and [under Elizabeth I and James I] the kingdome
being in a happy peace with all other nations, and in itself [. . .] there was no
employments for heroic spirits’ (Cavendish Natures Pictures, p. 187). This portrait
opens a bifurcated account of lives radically reshaped by war. Before the war her
parents took a simple approach to raising their family: lavish children with
‘superfluity’ and they shall never be ‘sharking’, ‘mean’ or base’; dress them ‘to the
height of their estate’ and they will recognise their own social superiority; protect
them from ‘vulgar’ influences and ‘unseemly actions’ and they will not suffer
‘infection by ill examples’; and ‘please’, ‘delight’ and ‘reason’ rather than scold,
threaten or beat and they will willingly curb base impulses and embrace reason
(Cavendish Natures Pictures, pp. 188–190). This emotional grooming produced a
close-knit family of ‘like agreeable natures and affectionable dispositions’ (Cavendish
Natures Pictures, p. 192). Their life, routinely divided between county obligations
and fashionable London pastimes, was interrupted by ‘an unnatural war [that] like
a whirlwind [. . .] felled down their houses’ and ‘crusht [some] to death’ (Cavendish
Natures Pictures, p. 192). Although Cavendish (Natures Pictures, p. 198) would
130 Diana G. Barnes
‘lament’ these losses for the rest of her life, she recognised that civil war afforded
unique opportunities for noble action, heroism and just reward.
In Cavendish’s account a powerful and disorienting emotional experience, such
as grief and its expression in tears, represents a liminal emotional state between
two extremes: passionate loss of control and reasoned heroic action. The emotional
devastation (grief, fear, anger etc.) wreaked by war necessitated an important
exercise of individual liberty: namely to choose how to respond. One of her
brothers, Sir Charles Lucas, was ‘shot to death for his loyal service’ and faced it
with ‘a superfluity of courage’ (Cavendish Natures Pictures, p. 198; Whitaker 2002,
pp. 105–106). Wartime heroism was not restricted to men; Cavendish (Natures
Pictures, p. 196) recalls that her mother shed ample tears over her husband and
sons, yet ‘in such misfortunes [she] was of an heroic spirit, in suffering patiently
where there is no remedie, [and being] industrious where she thought she could
help’. War also impelled Cavendish into action. Hearing that the Queen’s entourage
was diminished, she petitioned successfully to be a maid of honour (Natures Pictures,
p. 193). Cavendish (Natures Pictures, p. 198) celebrates her family’s capacity to
embrace wartime opportunities for constancy, loyalty and service, but she
acknowledged the extremity of bereavement, reporting without judgement that
her eldest sister died of grief following her daughter’s death.
When Cavendish served as a maid of honour to the Queen, first at Oxford and
then Paris, she was part of an emotional regime bound by loyalism and the longing
and nostalgia of political exile. At the French court she met her future husband,
William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, Commander of the Royalist Northern
Army, who had fled England after a devastating loss at the Battle of Marston
Moor. As a privy councillor and one-time tutor to the future Charles II he was
a leading figure in the expatriate royalist community. Although she was dowerless
and well below Newcastle’s class, he admired her bashful reticence, that is, her
humoral or emotional disposition, and fell in love with her. She ‘had not the
power to refuse him, by reason [her] affections were fixed on him,’ but she
stresses, this ‘love was honest and honorable’, and not ‘infected’ with ‘amorous
love’, which she viewed as ‘a disease, or a passion’ (Natures Pictures, pp. 194–195;
Fitzmaurice 2004). Whatever the underlying balance of reason and emotion,
marriage to Newcastle positioned Cavendish within a political community of
entitled and self-sacrificing royalists anticipating just rewards after the wars, and
actively debating the relationship between emotions and war in intellectual, literary
and political terms.
Newcastle and his brother, Sir Charles Cavendish, were at the centre of an
intellectual circle devoted to discussing new philosophical ideas, in particular the
passions, and the causes of civil war (Jacob & Raylor 1991, pp. 215–227). They
hosted a salon in Paris, patronised intellectuals and literati, and maintained a wide
intellectual correspondence network (Jacquot 1952; Malcolm 1996; Whitaker
2002, pp. 91–94).1 Two participants, Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, wrote
extensively about the passions. Their understanding of the passions was far more
capacious than ours is of the emotions. They not only classified states that we
recognise as emotions, such as love, envy, hate, fear and melancholy, as passions,
but also character traits (good nature, bashfulness and greed), passive states (wonder),
drives, (appetite, desire or aversion), and ephemeral states (sudden glory) (Schmitter
2014; 2016). The passions were gaining definition but there was no consensus.
Whereas Descartes defined them as receptive passive states, a kind of thinking
involving rudimentary judgement and somatic memory, that could be shaped via
education, Hobbes saw them as the first stirrings of action or movement (James
1999, pp. 87–108, 124–136). The new philosophy theorised physical motion, and
psychological emotion, in order to establish a grand system of how the world
worked. Newcastle valued such schemes as aids to understanding how civil war
could erupt (Sarasohn 1999).2 Such theoretical endeavour was intimately connected
to his well-developed views of how statesmen should serve crown and country,
and the public utility of cultural practice (Cavendish 1984).
Prior to the war Newcastle had written plays for the London stage, and had
been patron to a number of dramatists, including Ben Jonson, Richard Brome,
William Davenant and James Shirley. On the surface humoral comedy and social
farce of the kind modelled by Jonson, and adapted by Shirley, Brome, Newcastle
and others, was not overtly political. Defining characters primarily by a dom-
inant trait, such as anger, pride or vanity, however, provided a forum to explore
how different emotions colour the character of a community. The readiness of
dramatists associated with Newcastle to enlist in military service (Shirley and
Davenant, for example, and Jonson before them) suggests the easy transition they
perceived between theatrical practice and war (Pathsupati 2012; Donaldson 2011,
pp. 93–98). Davenant made an important position statement in his Preface to
Gondibert (1650), laying forth a post-war literary tradition determined to serve
political ends by giving readers an emotional education. It was published with
Hobbes’ endorsement of its philosophical underpinnings. Davenant argued that
civil war occurred when ‘the State and People are divided, as wee may say a man
is divided within him selfe, when reason and passion (and Passion is folly) dispute
about consequent actions’ (Gondibert, p. 36). In cases of ‘intestine warre’ he
continued ‘we must side with Reason’ and thereby honour ‘natures Law [which]
hath taken deep impression in the Heart of Man’ (Gondibert, p. 36). To this end
he proposed instilling virtue via heroic verse in dramatic five-act form that
employed characters representing ‘the distempers of Love, or Ambition’, plots
drawn from myth, and gentle persuasion rather than force (Gondibert, pp. 10–13,
38; Chua 2014; Shershaw 1999). By 1653 Davenant had left Gondibert half-written
and was actively promoting dramatic performance of martial scenes drawn from
recent history to the commonwealth government in London (Jacob & Raylor
1991, p. 213) and conceptualising his operatic drama The Siege of Rhodes (1656)
(Chua 2014, pp. 51–55).
In the early restoration when Cavendish’s Playes were published, the English
public theatre was being redefined under pressure of recent and endemic war. The
royalist spin opposed Puritan emotional constraint to royalist liberty of feeling and
celebrated the formal reopening of the theatres as the return of a royalist institution.
132 Diana G. Barnes
As Paulina Kewes (2004, p. 133) argues: ‘The myth of the abiding royalism of
pre-civil War drama’ provided a ‘convenient’ means for ‘aspiring playwrights’ to
‘cast the intervening years as an aberration’. In fact, as David Scott Kastan (1999,
pp. 201–220) explains, the closure of theatres by Parliamentary ordinance in 1642
was motivated less by Puritanism, and more by the imperative to restrict freedoms
of association and assembly. Parliament recognised the theatre’s capacity to ‘make
publics’, that is, groups of people who judge and take action (Yachnin & Eberhart
2014; Wilson & Yachnin 2010). Theatrical practice did not cease completely
between 1642 and 1660 (Potter 1989, pp. 72–112; Straznicky 2004), but adapted
and gained political force, particularly in print (Kastan 1999, p. 217). The stage
became a key term employed by all parties, in political and religious discussion of
the war particularly in print (Wiseman 1998, pp. 2–6; Barnes 2013, pp. 116, 124).
The dedications, letters and introductory dialogues appended to published
plays, already an established forum for polemic on the ‘affective technologies’ of
drama, and the civilities of audience response (Mullaney 2007), were readily
adapted to royalist ends. In the copious paratexts appended to one of the most
significant royalist dramatic publications of the period, Humphrey Moseley’s 1647
folio edition of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Comedies and Tragedies, for
example, metatheatrical discussion of passion nurtures wistful affection for traditions
and values interrupted by war. In a letter ‘To the Reader’, Shirley acclaims drama
‘the most absolute’ art owing to its emotional versatility: it can represent ‘not only
the Phlegm and folly of thick-skinn’d men, but [. . .] the Vertues and passions of
every noble condition’. Nostalgically he recalls that ‘the very Pleasure [of watching
a play] did edify’ but, he tells readers, ‘in this Tragicall Age where the Theatre hath
been so much out acted, congratulate thy owne happiness, that in this silence of the Stage,
thou hast a liberty to reade these inimitable Playes’ (Beaumont & Fletcher 1647, n.p.).
Print plays sustain liberty and effect the reproduction of ‘happiness’ and other
politically contingent passions. Far more effective than ‘the sowrer ways of
education’, in drama ‘passions [are] raised to that excellent pitch and by such
insinuating degrees that you shall not chuse but consent, & go along with them,
finding yourself at last grown insensibly the very same person you read, and then
stand admiring the subtile trackes of your engagement’ (Beaumont & Fletcher
1647, n.p.).
Moseley’s Beaumont and Fletcher folio entrenched in royalist discourse the
argument that print drama stimulates audience identification and emulation and
thus nourishes a threatened emotional regime. In the preface to Loves Dominion
(1654) Richard Flecknoe, another associate of the Cavendishes (Whitaker 2004,
pp. 120–121), also presents drama’s pedagogical advantage over sullen sermons in
his programme for ‘the Reformed Stage’, a text that instills virtue via delightful
persuasion; ‘let who’s list take the black melancholy spirit [he asserts, but], give me
the light cheerful one’ (Flecknoe 1654, n.p.). War permeates discussions of royalist
affect, for example, William Chamberlayne described Loves Victory (1658) as ‘begot
while Clamourous War’s cry was hot’ and ‘the mourning Stage was silent’ (quoted
in Rollins 1921, p. 59). In the preface to the 1658 reprint of Thomas Heywood’s
defence of theatre, Thomas Cartwright presents drama as a cultural defence,

explaining that he overcame his wariness of print because it ‘was better to wear
rusty Armour, than go naked’ (Heywood 1658). Playing on the political resonance
of these terms in the early restoration, Flecknoe insisted that he would rather an
audience encounter Erminia (1661) in print than badly staged (Keenan 2014,
pp. 42–45). When royalist polemicists presented drama as an ‘academy’ for
emotional civilities that ensure peace (Flecknoe 1654), they articulated a mechanistic
view of the passions as pre-rational feelings or judgements triggered by external
stimuli, which the average spectator cannot, or will not, self-regulate.
Cavendish uses the paratexts to her Playes to position her work within royalist
theatrical discourse about the passions – and to preempt her critics. These aims
overlap to a degree. By 1662 Cavendish had published five titles amid some
controversy: the fact that she had published at all; whether her works were her
own; the quality of her writing and philosophical reasoning; and the question of
her sanity. The paratexts to Playes appear in following sequence: a poem, ‘The
Dedication’; ‘The Epistle Dedicatory’ to Newcastle; 10 letters to the reader; a
poem, ‘To the Lady Marquess of Newcastle’, by her husband; a poem, ‘A General
Prologue to all my Playes’; and a dialogue entitled, ‘An Introduction’. Cavendish’s
agenda is most clearly spelled out in her dedication to her husband. The letters to
the reader cover a range of topics: the first advertises the forthcoming biography
of her husband (n.p.); the second justifies publishing plays written while the
theatres were closed (n.p.); the third presents natural variety as a more effective
means of teaching about the passions than classical dramatic unities of time, place
and action (sig. Aivr); the fourth is a pitch for noble rather than paid actors in
public theatres; the fifth concerns her rejection of conventional ‘Rules, Forms and
Terms’ (n.p.); the sixth debunks the assumption that authors speak as they write;
the seventh insists that her plays ‘join edifying Profit and Delight together’ (n.p.);
the eighth asserts that no-one helped ‘sow’ the scenes together (n.p.); the ninth
acknowledges songs and scenes contributed by Newcastle (sig. Avir); and the tenth
recommends that ‘Playes must be read to the nature of those several humours, or
passions [. . .] as if they were spoke or Acted’ (sig. Aviv). Inconsistency of pagination,
print formatting and devices suggests that letters 1, 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8 were interpolated
after printing, evidently as a defensive measure.3
Playes opens with ‘A Dedication’, a poem describing the author’s ‘pleasure and
delight’ in rehearsing the plays in her mind. The lines, ‘For all the time my Playes
a making were,/ My brain the Stage, my thoughts were acting there’ (sig. Aiir;
see Gallagher 1988; Tomlinson 1992; Barnes 2013 p. 163 ff.), rich with royalist
connotation, contextualise the volume within the interregnum. When the theatres’
doors were shut, in her mind’s eye Cavendish was free to imagine performances
irrespective of adverse external conditions. Delight, generated imaginatively,
represents royalist hope, nourished by her husband. In the dedicatory letter to
Newcastle, she credits him with having ‘Create[d] a desire in [her] Mind to write
Playes’ (sig. Aiiir). She counterpoises the ‘natural life, and [. . .] quick spirit’ of
his plays with her own ‘dull dead statues’ (sig. Aiiir). Whereas his were written for
134 Diana G. Barnes
and performed in the Caroline theatre, hers were written while the theatres were
closed. Print offers Cavendish certain advantages: it protects her on the one hand
from ‘the fear of having them hissed off from the Stage’ if the audience does not
favour them; and on the other, if the plays deserve applause, envy, faction and
condemnation (Playes, sig. Aiiir). Cavendish swears she is no ‘Coward’, but here
admits it ‘would have made [her] a little Melancholy to have [her] harmless
and innocent Playes go weeping from the Stage, and whipt by malicious and
hardhearted censurers’ (Playes, sig. Aiiiv). Asserting the liberty afforded her to
embrace and creatively bolster royalism by marriage, she concludes: ‘but the truth
is, I am careless, for so I have your applause I desire no more’ (Playes, sig. Aiiiv).
In a dedicatory poem to the author Newcastle affirms her role as a print play-
wright in ensuring the reproduction of royalist affect: ‘When we read your each
Passion in each Play [. . .] at your pleasure all our passions ly’ (n.p). When
Cavendish describes the extremes of delight and melancholy, she identifies
emotional disequilibrium as the underlying cause of the recent wars, and sympathy
as its cure. Marriage to Newcastle stimulates her imagination, bridles melancholy,
allays fear, instills hope and insulates her from judgement driven by passions that
fuel faction and war.
Dramatic form allows Cavendish to enter a politicised debate about emotions
through character. When Cavendish warns readers in ‘A General Prologue’ to
expect ‘Cottages of Prose and Rhime’ wrought from her own imagination rather
than Jonsonian masterpieces (Playes, sigs Avii–Aviiv), she acknowledges a prece-
dent that her plays emulate and exceed (Williams 2000, p. 205; Dodds 2013,
pp. 159–182). Most of her characters are named for emotional states: Lady Bashful,
Lady Passionate, Lord Peaceable Studious, and so on. In the tradition of humoral
comedy, this device signals embedded moral argument and social commentary.
But whereas England was at peace when Jonson wrote, the aftermath of civil war
dominated Cavendish’s writing life. Her overriding concern is peace and women’s
contribution to achieving and maintaining it. As Lady Speaker of The Female
Academy explains, drama is the ideal host for such discussion because: ‘A Theatre
is a publick place for publick Actions, Orations, Disputations, Presentations,
whereunto is a publick resort; but there are only two Theatres, which are the
chief, and the most frequented; the one is of War, the other of Peace; the Theatre
of Warr is the Field, and the Battles they fight are the Plays they act’ (The Female
Academy, IV: 22, p. 669). Civil war reverberates throughout the emotional fabric
of Playes, but Loves Adventure, parts 1 and 2, and Bell in Campo, parts 1 and 2,
directly concern war.
In Loves Adventure,4 parts 1 and 2, Lady Orphant, cross-dressed as the page
Affectionata, navigates war with emotional competency. The plot concerns her
courtship with Lord Singularity, the General, named for his stated aversion to
marriage. The time and place are not specified but, as in England, the characters
hail from a country recovering from recent war, and they meet in a distant land
where Lord Singularity is fighting another war. At their first meeting, they discuss
the correlation between emotion and war:
SINGULARITY: Pray how is my Country, and Countrey-men, live they

still in happy peace, and flourishing with plenty?
AFFECTIONATA: There is no noise of war, or fear of famine.
SINGULARITY: Pray Jove continue it.
AFFECTIONATA: It is likely so to continue, unless their pride and luxurie
begets a factious childe, that is born with war, and fed with ruine.
SINGULARITY: Do you know what faction is?
AFFECTIONATA: There is no man that lives, and feels it not, the very
thoughts are factious in the mind, and in Rebellious passions arises
warring against the soul.
SINGULARITY: Thou cannot speak thus by experience boy, thou art too
young, not yet at mans Estate.
AFFECTIONATA: But children have thoughts, and said to have a rational
soul, as much as those that are grown up to men; but if souls grow as
bodies doth, and thoughts increases with their years, then may the wars
within the mind be like to School-boys quarrels, that falls out for a toy,
and for a toy are friends.
(LA 1. III: 16, p. 48)
According to Affectionata, all people, even children, have the potential for war
within; their thoughts tend naturally to the creation of factions, and their passions
battle within their minds. Cavendish identifies two emotional regimes: a chaotic
and combative one in which individuals are drawn to faction and perpetual war;
and a well-governed orderly one in which individuals govern their passions
and live sociably with others. This sounds very like Hobbes. In De Cive (Hobbes
1642, p. 116), a work dedicated to Newcastle, he describes the state of nature as
‘a Dominion of Passions, war, fear, poverty, slovinlinesse, solitude, barbarisme,
ignorance, cruelty’, and the commonwealth or society as ‘the Dominion of reason,
peace, security, riches, decency, society, elegancy, sciences, and benevolence’. In
the state of nature man is led willy-nilly by his passions and senses, but in society
contract bridles and directs men’s passions for the common good. In the Leviathan
(1651 XVII, p. 359), Hobbes identifies ‘The passions that incline men to peace
[as]: fear of death; and desire of such things as are necessary to commodious
living’. These passions move men to restrain those negative passions that foster
what Hobbes (1651 XIII, p. 351) describes as a ‘disposition’ to war. Like Hobbes,
Cavendish is concerned to distinguish between ‘what drives conflict and what
allows cooperative endeavor’ (Schmitter 2014). In the scene cited above Cavendish
identifies pride, greed and fear as passions, or appetites, that fuel conflict. In
contradistinction to Hobbes, in her dedication to Newcastle she presents sympathy
and unguarded approval of the kind fostered by marriage, rather than fear and self-
interest, as passions that mitigate the warring potential of envy and melancholy.
For Cavendish, then, marriage is ideally a bridge between different and potentially
opposed parties.5
136 Diana G. Barnes
Cavendish’s plays connect commentary on marriage to political theory.

Affectionata defines war as an emotional conflict between positive and negative
passions, or the virtues and graces, on the one hand, and vices and follies, on the
other:
AFFECTIONATA: [. . .] the souls of all mankind, they are like Common-

wealths, where the several vertues, and the good graces are the Citizens
therein, and the natural subjects thereof; but vices and follies, as thievish
Borderers, and Neighbour-enemies, which makes inrodes, factions,
mutinies, intrudes and usurps Authority, and if the follies be more than
the good graces, and the vices too strong for the vertues, the Monarchy
of a good life falls to ruine, also it is endangered by Civil-wars amongst
the passions.
(LA 1. IV, p. 56)
Sympathetic marriage is an emotional contract that secures the natural sociability

essential to peace by quelling ‘anger, malice, and despair’, the emotions in each
person’s mind that Affectionata identifies as the most significant threats to what is
pointedly described as ‘the Monarchy of a good life’ (LA 1. IV, p. 56). As
Affectionata states, ‘no man ought to be a Master of a Family, but those that can
govern orderly and peaceably’ (LA 2. IV: 28, p. 95). This idea is developed in
another plotline in which Lady Ignorant, frustrated by the quiet life and her
husband Lord Peaceable Studious’s absorption in books, persuades him to go with
her into society. Peaceable Studious embraces the experience. He flirts with other
women openly, making Ignorant very uneasy. After she has learned her lesson
they resume their old routines. Peaceable Studious observes that when husbands
‘take it as a great pleasure to make wives jealouse’, they ‘separate their affections,
and [. . .] make a disorder in their Families’ which, like war, is characterised by
‘plot and design’ (LA 2. II: 14, p. 82). But, he explains: ‘when a man lives to
himself within his own Family [. . .] he governs orderly, eats peaceably, sleeps
quietly, lives contentedly, and most commonly, plentifully and pleasantly, ruling
and governing his little Family to his own humour, wherein he commands with
love, and is obeyed with duty’ (LA 2. II: 14, p. 82). ‘[W]ho,’ he asks rhetorically,
‘that is wise, and is not mad, would quit this heavenly life to live in hellish
Societies’, responding, those who shun this ‘stand upon a Quagmire, or rotten
Foundation, that will never hold or indure, that is, they are neither grounded on
honesty, nor supported with honour’ (LA 2. II: 14, p. 82). Ideally, marriage is a
mini-commonwealth grounded on a sympathetic contract, fostering humours that
support a peaceful emotional regime within the body politic.
When Affectionata is faced with the challenge of gaining the sympathy of a
man opposed to marriage, that is, a man whose affective philosophy carries the
seeds of war, she shuns eloquence in favour of heroic action. Affectionata’s heroism
comprises both valiant bravery enabled by ‘acting a masculine part upon the
Worlds great Stage’ (LA 2. V: 34, p. 100), and the more conventionally understood
feminine activity of crying. She sheds tears to persuade Singularity to allow her to
accompany him to battle, again to persuade him to refuse the Duke of Venice’s
offer to adopt her, and finally to express ‘love, shame, grief and fear’ when
conflicted by her seemingly impossible love for Singularity and the consequences
of her disguise for her elderly guardians, Foster Trusty and Nurse Fondly (LA 2.
V: 34, p. 100). Each occasion sparks discussion of the passions. When Singularity
observes: ‘But thy tears seems as if they were produced from some passion’,
Affectionata relays the following emotional theory: ‘Indeed they are produced
from passions and appetites, for passions are the rayes of the mind, and appetites
the vapour of the sense, and the rayes of the mind hath drawn up the vapour of
my sense into thick moist clouds, which falls in showering tears’ (LA 2. V: 34,
p. 100). Although, by this account, tears reflect passionate disequilibrium, over
and again they effect a sympathetic response in Singularity who endeavours to
subdue her melancholy.
Tears mingled with blood gush through civil-war royalist elegy, lament and
complaint, giving poetic and political expression to a grief that exceeds words
and comprehension. Whereas early civil war royalist elegy celebrated ‘the soldier’s
sacrificial bargain to suffer his own maiming or extinction in order to keep an
ideological body intact’ (Gray 2013, p. 172), late civil-war elegy, including poetic
tributes to Cavendish’s brother, Sir Charles Lucas, expressed a more ambivalent
attitude toward bloodshed and military virtue. In Fons Lachrymarum, or Fountain of
Tears (1648), a collection dedicated to Lucas’s memory, Francis Quarles has
England beg: ‘Convert my tydes of blood to streams of tears, / [. . .] let me / Dissolve
to tears (dear God) and weep to thee:/ [. . .] To send these showres to wash away
that blood / VVhich I have lost’ (‘England’s Petition to Heaven’, in Quarles 1648,
pp. 27–28). The blood flowing through the verse is men’s, but the tears are shed
by poets, muses, England, God, wives, mothers and men.
Although women were involved in all aspects of the civil war, royalist elegy
celebrates military heroism as a masculine virtue, and presents women as widows
and mothers, that is, as the embodiment of grief and constancy. Quarles (1648,
p. 2) describes being so ‘distracted’ with grief that all his muses had dispersed,
except the tragic muse ‘Melpomene, who now appears / Like Nioby, a monument
of tears’. Here Quarles cites Niobe, the bereaved mother and widow, as a classical
personification of despair conventional to debates about emotional authenticity
(Oakley-Brown 2006, p. 69; Enterline 2012, pp. 138–139; Steggle 2007) that
gained force during the civil wars. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid recounts Niobe’s
proud defiance of the God Latona, the murder of her seven sons and seven
daughters and the suicide of her husband, her metamorphosis into stone, and the
tears that continue to flow. Niobe also adorns the frontispiece of Lachrymae
Musarum, Tears of the Muses (1649), the elegies commemorating the death of
royalist Colonel-General, Sir Henry Hastings collated by playwright Richard
Brome. She is depicted as a weeping statue surrounded by the muses, signalling
the resonance of her intensely felt, but silent, memorialisation of bereavement to
civil war elegy.6 As Ovid (1567, V ll. 396–397) tells it, the story of Niobe taught
138 Diana G. Barnes
‘men and women’ to ‘[fear]’ the ‘open ire’ of the Gods, and to worship ‘with far
greater sumptuousness and earnester desire’. Zealousness motivated by fear was
not the lesson royalist poets drew from Niobe; rather in the much admired
Ovidian style popularised by the historical female complaints, they admired her
fearlessness, dignity, pride of family, position and lineage, and her refusal to
capitulate to oppressive religious strictures. Niobe paid the ultimate emotional
price for her heroic stand, but she does not buckle: tears flow over her stony form
and she continues to emote. In his contribution to Lachrymae Musarum, Francis
Standish praises Hastings’s mother for her ‘Stoick’ ‘Philosophie’ and ‘patient
suffering of affliction’ distinguishing her from Niobe’s ‘still weeping Marble-
monument’ (‘Upon the right Honourable, LUCIE Countess of Huntingdon’s
Heroick and most Christian bearing of that grand Affliction, the death of her onely
Son, The young Lord HASTINGS’) (Brome 1649, p. 25). In a compendium of
ancient and modern sources bearing ‘relation to the late warr’, Robert Grove
identifies Niobe as a reference point for a philosophical debate about the fitting
expression of extreme emotions, citing Seneca ‘Cur[a]es loquuntur, ingentes stupent’
(Light sorrows speak but the deepest sorrows stupefy) (1651, p. 62).7
Cavendish does not mention Niobe in her civil war plays, but the moral debate
about managing overpowering emotion associated with Niobe, and the heroic
female complaint and its popular adaptation to English history in verse and drama,
inform her treatment of wartime grief in Bell in Campo.8 The play presents an
argument about emotion, gender and war through its characters Madam Passionate,
Lady Victoria, Madam Jantil, and a chorus of angry, then grieving, women. True
to her name, Passionate is a slave to her emotions: she slumps into melancholy
when her husband, Monsieur La Hardy, goes to war; ‘her Spirits are drown’d in
sorrow’ when he dies (BC 1. IV: 19, p. 130); she is seduced by the flattery of a
young suitor and remarries, unhappily thereafter. When Jantil’s husband, Seigneur
Valeroso, leaves for war, she says jealously: ‘I cannot chuse but take it unkindly
that you will go without me, do you mistrust my affection?’ (BC 1. II: 7, p. 115).
She dreams presciently of his death, and in the terms of royalist elegy envisages,
‘His wounds fresh bleeding blood like rubies bright’ (BC 1. III: 3, p. 127). When
his death is confirmed, Jantil ‘seems not disturb’d’ although her maid, Nell Careless,
weeps profusely (BC 1. III: 14, p. 129). Jantil advises Careless that ‘Life’s a curse
[but] since you cannot weep out life, bear it with patience’ (BC 1. IV: 21, p. 131).
To this end Jantil commissions her husband’s biography and designs a magnificent
tomb celebrating his valour. Within she places ‘the Statues of the four Cardinal
Virtues [. . .] sitting as in weeping posture’, and without a grove of ‘Trees [in
which] the Birds may sit and sing his Elegy’ (BC 1. IV: 21, p. 132). Jantil explains:
‘Although my sorrow appears not outwardly, yet my heart is dead within me’ and
embracing her grief she lives out her remaining days within her husband’s tomb
(BC 1. V: 25, p. 137). Only Victoria succeeds in persuading her husband, The
Lord General, to allow her to accompany him to war. Victoria is the femme forte;
she argues that custom alone has made women ‘weak and fearful’, unfit for public
office, and suited only for breeding (BC 1. II: 9, p. 119). When the Amazonian
army is stricken with tearful grief over brothers, fathers, husbands, sons and friends
lost in war, she declares that while ‘tis both natural and human to grieve for
the Death of our friends [. . .] tears nor lamentations cannot bring them out of the
grave’. Therefore she urges in terms resonant of early-civil-war royalist elegy, ‘let
your justice give them Death for Death [. . .] instead of weeping eyes, let us make
them weep through their Veins’ (BC 1. IV: 17, p. 128). Victoria redirects the
women’s inchoate grief into virtuous heroic action through education comprised
of speeches and a fortifying training programme involving military drills, strict
discipline, asceticism and marching songs celebrating ‘the heroic actions done in
former times by heroical women’ (BC 1. III: 11, p. 124).
In Bell in Campo, then, Passionate stands at one end of the emotional spectrum
oscillating uncontrollably from love to melancholic pining, inconsolable grief and
tears, desire and infatuation and, ultimately, unhappiness and regret. By contrast
Victoria and Jantil govern their feelings stoically, but to different ends.9 Jantil, ‘the
tragic elegist’, channels her sorrow towards honouring her husband’s life and, like
Niobe, casts her feelings in stone and thereby memorialises the national trauma of
war (Nelson & Alker 2008, p. 29). Victoria channels women’s anger and grief into
victorious heroic military action and for this gains fame and public honour. Her
likeness is ‘cast in Brass, and then set in the midst of the City’ (BC 2. V: 20,
pp. 167–168), memorialising female heroism born of the emotional devastation of
war.10 Thus in Bell in Campo Cavendish presents the emotional biographies of
wartime wives within an ongoing neostoic moral and political debate about
emotional governance in public life intensified by the recent civil wars.
In her fifth letter to the reader Cavendish challenges the ‘scholastic’ convention
of gendering the emotions declaring that her plays:
[D]o not keep strictly to the Masculine and Feminine Genders [. . .] as for
example, a Lock and a Key, the one is the Masculine Gender, the other the
Feminine Gender, so Love is the Masculine Gender, Hate the Feminine
Gender, and the Furies are shees, and the Graces are shees, the Virtues are
shees, and the seven deadly Sins are shees, which [she writes] I am sorry for;
but I know no reason but that I may as well make them Hees for my use,
as others did Shees, or Shees as others did Hees.
(Playes, sig. Aiv)
Recognising that rejecting convention involves the risk of being misunderstood,

she objects ‘we may as well understand the meaning or sense of a Speaker or
Writer by the names of Love or Hate, as by the names of he or she, and better;
for the division of Masculine and Feminine Genders doth confound a Scholar
more’ (Playes, n.p.). Amy Schmitter (2014) argues that seventeenth-century
philosophers neither wrote of emotions as gendered nor attributed particular
emotional expertise to women. Cavendish’s renunciation of ‘the nicities of Rules,
Forms, and Terms’ of gender and emotion is pitched at the philosophy of emotions
foundational to Davenant’s theatrical reform.
140 Diana G. Barnes
In ‘A Proposition for Advancement of Moralitie’ (1653) Davenant asserts the

correlation between civility, masculinity and preparedness for war, stating that:
‘the civilizing of a Nation makes [people] not effeminate, or too soft for such
discipline of war as enables them to affront their Enemies, but takes off that
rudeness by which they grow injurious to one another and impudent towards
authority’ (Jacob & Raylor 1991, p. 242). Davenant distinguishes here between
foreign and civil war and, in well-established terms, advocates emotional education
as an antidote to the latter. He writes ‘People will ever be unquiet while they are
ignorant of themselves, and unacquainted with those Engins that scrue them up,
which are their passions’ (Jacob & Raylor 1991, p. 244). He outlines how dramatic
spectacle stimulates delight and wonder, and thereby enhances an audience’s
tractability to the state. But he urges theatrical reform, stressing the importance of
wholesome, heroic subject matter drawn from recent history particularly ‘those
famous Battels at Land and Sea by which this Nation is renown’d [. . .] which will
not, like the softer arguments of Playes, make people effeminate, but warme and
incite them to Heroicall Attempts’ (Jacob & Raylor 1991, p. 246). Relatedly he
specifies that men should not act women’s parts. Davenant proposes staging
passions that were both devoid of that worrying feminine tendency of pre-civil
war drama and derived from men’s experience of war. Such public performances
would literally engender obedience to the governing regime and a readiness to
fight in its defence.
Cavendish rejects this gendered emotional economy. She embraces cross-
dressing as a plot device capable of ensuring a happy resolution, as in Loves
Adventures, when Affectionata’s true sex is revealed, and Singularity accepts it and
unflinchingly takes her as his wife. Cavendish also regenders emotions themselves,
for example, by attributing heroic virtue to women. Affectionata and Victoria, for
instance, are eloquent and rational in the tradition of the female complaint, and
valiant on the battlefield. Furthermore their military courage is based on sound
emotional principles. Affectionata becomes a thrashing machine and kills countless
opponents when her true love is threatened, and Victoria commands her army in
a just war to save the masculine army – and the nation. As Victoria asserts, this
‘prove[s] the courage of our Sex, to get liberty and freedome from the Female
Slavery, and makes [women] equal with men’ (BC 2. I: 3, p. 143). The liberty
Cavendish’s Amazonian ‘Heroickesses’ embraces, then, is the freedom to exercise
courage, the passion conventional to battle, and thus claim a species of ‘glory’ once
reserved for men. The early moderns categorised glory as an inherently social
passion, conferred on a person by others. They viewed it as crucial to a well-run
society because people heed and emulate a glorious person. In Cavendish’s plays
the characters who achieve glory not only model lives in which the passions are
well-governed and directed to positive action, but embed that affect into aesthetic
monuments (stone, brass or words) that preserve exemplary feminine virtue in the
national cultural memory. As Cavendish signals in her paratexts such works are
important because glory can stimulate envy and faction; if it is not well managed,
it will undermine the sociable contract.
In her Playes Cavendish sought to depict a new emotional landscape born out
of England’s recent history of war and to articulate a heroic civil code that would
fit the newly restored state and enfranchise women in the emergent royalist
emotional regime. Cavendish challenged the royalist theatrical and philosophical
discourses that were gaining solid form as an emotional regime. She recognised
the importance of emotional discourse as a conduit for political values and as a
stabilising foundation crucial for a political regime after civil war; but she contested
the gendering of the discourse that was gaining authority.
Notes
1 Participants included René Descartes, Marin Mersenne, Thomas Hobbes, John Bramhall,
Anna van Schurman and Christina of Sweden.
2 Hobbes had a long association with the Cavendish family and dedicated a number of
works to William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle. See Sarasohn 1999.
3 I thank Gweno Williams and Alan Stewart for discussing this with me.
4 All subsequent references to Loves Adventure are cited in-text as ‘LA’, and followed by
Act, Scene, and line numbers. All page numbers are from the Shaver (1999) edition.
5 For Cavendish’s treatment of marriage in Sociable Letters (1664) see Barnes 2013,
p. 144 ff.
6 Interestingly, the short Latin verse on the frontispiece compares tears to a seeping
pustule. Hastings died of smallpox rather than battle wounds. I am grateful to Michael
Bennett for the following translation ‘How the muse Niobe would lie weeping at a
revered hero’s urn so at your corpse and, O Argus, at yours. Just as the spiteful pain of
disease flowed and the pustule swelled up so [will] a tear well up in a thousand eyes.
Weep goddesses this flower of the Britons has been laid under the earth. Unprompted,
amongst the tears, the Castalian spring spouts’.
7 Robert Grove, Gleanings, or a Collection of Some memorable Passages, Both Ancient and
Modern, Many in relation to the late warre (1651).
8 All subsequent reference to Bell in Campo will be cited in-text as ‘BC’, followed by Act,
Scene and line numbers. All page numbers are from the Shaver (1999) edition.
9 On stoicism in The Unnatural Tragedy (Cavendish 1662), see Bennett (2011).
10 On Lady Victoria, see Stanton (2007) and Raber (2000).
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9
‘AT NEWBURN FOORD, WHERE
BRAVE SCOTS PAST THE TINE’
Emotions, literature, and the
Battle of Newburn1
Gordon D. Raeburn
On 20 August 1640 a Scottish Covenanter army, led by General Alexander Leslie,

crossed the River Tweed at Coldstream, thereby entering England. Eight days
later they met and defeated an English royalist force at Newburn Ford, on the
River Tyne, six miles outside of Newcastle. The resulting Scottish occupation of
a large part of Northern England, including Newcastle and Durham, forced
Charles I to a truce, and an agreement to pay the expenses of the Scottish army.2
The Battle of Newburn was the only battle of the Second Bishops’ War, a
conflict that had arisen from ongoing attempts to impose ecclesiastical uniformity
with England upon Scotland. The subsequent signing of the National Covenant
in Edinburgh in 1638, and the First Bishops’ War in 1639, had ended, as far as
the Scots were concerned, with an agreement as to the preservation of Scottish
laws and religion. It would seem, however, that Charles I had no intention of
abandoning his attempts to impose episcopacy in Scotland, and by 1640 conflict
was once again on the horizon.3
In addition to the concessions made by Charles I following the Battle of
Newburn, the invasion of England by Leslie’s forces in 1640 unsurprisingly resulted
in much correspondence, propaganda and printed works on both sides of the
conflict, both before and after the crossings of the Tweed and Tyne. In many
instances these works, either private letters or works for public consumption, were
possessed of and displayed true emotion, but in certain cases they were also clear
attempts to shape the emotional responses of the audience to the battle and its
aftermath.
Before the Battle

In the run up to the Battle of Newburn several pamphlets and broadsides,
anonymously authored, but on behalf of the ‘Scottish people’, were printed within
146 Gordon D. Raeburn
Scotland that addressed an English audience, explaining the Scottish position and
intentions. These were all relatively short works which all contained distinct
emotional elements. The first of these printed works, Information from the Estaits of
the kingdome of Scotland, to the kingdome of England, began:
The troubles which these years bygone afflicted this nation, and storms
which threatned both kingdomes, being apparently concluded by capitulation
at the borders; The subjects of this kingdome re-turned from thence, not
only very confident to have enjoyed peace among themselves, by the
Parliament & Assembly promised for settling all disorders arisen for the want
of these, but also to have gained the English in a further degree of friendship,
having cleared the calumnies laid to our charge, both by our carriage and
by discovering the fountaines, whence the mischief then escaped, had flowed.
(Information from the Estaits of the kingdome
of Scotland 1640, p. 3)
This is a very clear attempt to establish quickly a friendship between Scotland and
England in the minds of the common English man and woman who may have
read this work, and to highlight this international friendship as an outcome of the
events of the previous year. It is also quite important to note that the author or
authors were very quick to suggest that the Scottish army and the Scottish people
had been lied about by the English authorities, an extension of which is that the
English authorities were lying to the English people. This in turn could have been
an attempt to suggest to the English audience that there was a degree of separation
between them and the English authorities, and perhaps more common ground
with the Scots could be found. Indeed, as was subsequently emphasised:
for as we hold that no obligation bindeth so fast, as that of Religion, so do

those who are contrary to our Religion hold the same; and as that maxime
doth make them hold fast together, should not likewise all good Christians
and Patriots in this isle, labour to mantaine love and friendship among our
selves, and with the rest of the Protestants about us? Should we not be
stirred up by the valour and successe of lesse powerfull nations, to joyn with
united armes against the whore of Babel and her supports; should we not
open our ears to the lamentations of the princely children of our Kings only
sister, who in severall parts of the world (but all banished from their own
inheritance) are crying for pitie and relief, rather than break the bonds,
whereby we are so often tyed, and make sport to the Pope and his children,
the Bishops, by killing one another, to mantaine their pride and usurpation?
of Scotland 1640, pp. 8–9)
This section again highlights the shared bond of friendship between England
and Scotland, but this time emphasises that this friendship was also due to the
The Battle of Newburn 147
commonality of religion. As befits two nations who shared the same religion
should they not join together against those who would oppose them, namely
Charles I, as he would have attempted to impose changes to their religion? In
addition to friendship and shared religion, however, this piece also appeals to a
sense of shared emotional response to the suffering of others. Such a sympathetic
response to the lamentations of those banished from their inheritance, in
conjunction with the bonds of common religion, should, for the authors of this
piece, draw the Scots and English together, an outcome that would have proven
unhappy for their enemies. Any conflict between Scotland and England would
serve only to please Charles I and the Pope, enemies, in the minds of the
Covenanters, to true religion. By using such affective terminology in an appeal to
their international friends the authors were clearly attempting to elicit an emotional
response from their audience, hopefully leading to an increased sense of solidarity
for the Scots among the English people. Of course, friendship and a common
religion did not mean that there was no separation between Scotland and England:
For as we meddle not with the laws of England, nor their Parliaments, when
there is difference betwixt the King and them, so ought not the English to
meddle with us: For the kingdomes are independent of each other, and their
government distinct, and will not therein be ordered the one by the others
example, even in things needfull.
Despite the friendship between Scotland and the English people, it was clear that
Scotland would not willingly have changes to their religion imposed upon them.
Surely the English people could understand that?
The second piece to be printed in Scotland was a broadside entitled Information
from the Scottish Nation, to all the true English, concerning the present Expedition, the
first paragraph of which ended:
To maintain an Army on the borders is above our strength, & cannot be a

safety unto us by Sea: To retire homeward, were to call on our Enemies to
follow us, & to make our selves & our Countrey, a prey by land, as our
Ships & goods are made at Sea. We are therefore constrained at this time to
come into England, not to make warre, but for seeking our relief and
preservation.
(Information from the Scottish Nation 1640)
Having established a friendship between England and Scotland in the previous

work it was clearly important to the author that the English people understood
that the army, which was about to cross the border, was not there with violence
in mind. Indeed, as was subsequently stated, ‘Duetie obligeth us to love England as
our selves: Your grievances are ours, The preservation or ruine of Religion &
Liberties, is common to both Nations: We must now stand or fall together’
(Information from the Scottish Nation 1640). The Scots were clearly attempting to
emphasise that they were not there to take from or hurt the friends they had in
the English. The honourable intentions of the Scottish army were further reinforced
by stating, ‘And where it may be conceived, that an Army cannot come into
England but they will waste & spoile, We declare, that no Souldiours shall be
allowed to commit any out-rage, or do the smallest wrong, but shalbe punished
with severity’ (Information from the Scottish Nation 1640). The author of this piece
was clearly trying to instil in the English people that the Scottish army would
encounter upon crossing the border a sense of trust and common feeling rather
than the understandable fear of an invading army. As with the previous example
this work also utilised affective language and terminology in order, perhaps, to
increase the depth of feeling for their cause among the English audience, by
appealing once more to sympathetic feelings south of the border. The author
stresses that the Scottish people love the English, and hopefully the same can be
said of the English for the Scots. Once more, this affection for one another should
allow for a sympathetic response from those in England.
A similar attempt was made in the subsequent printed work, The Intentions of
the Army of the Kingdome of Scotland, Declared to their Brethren of England, in which
was stated:
Wee now before GOD and the world, make offer in generall, and will make
offer to so many of them as will require it in particular, of the strongest and
most inviolable bond of our solemne Oath and religious attestation of the
great Name of GOD, who is our feare & our dread, & from whom we hope
for a blessing upon our Expedition, that we intend no enimitie or rapine,
and shall take no mans goods, nor ingage our selves in blood by fighting,
unlesse we be forced unto it.
(The Intentions of the Army of the Kingdome
of Scotland 1640, p. 6)
This statement of intent is slightly different in that it contains the qualifying state-
ment that the Scottish army would fight if they were forced to, which could be
read as an appeal for solidarity as well as a warning not to oppose them. Indeed,
this work is the first in which the probability of conflict is alluded to, although
the Scots must have known all along that this was inevitable:
All the designe of both Kingdomes is, for the trueth of Religion, and for
the just Liberty of the Subject; and all the devices and doings of the enemy
are for oppressing of both, that our Religion may bee turned into Super-
stition and Atheisme, and our Libertie into base servitude and bondage:
To bring this to passe, they have certainly conceived, that the blocking up
of this Kingdome by Sea and Land, would proove a powerfull and infallible
meane: for either within a very short time shall wee through want of trade,
and spoyling of our goods, bee brought to such extreamity, poverty, and
confusion, that we shall miserably desire the conditions which wee now
despise and declyne, and bee forced to embrace their will for a Law, both
in Kirk and Policie, which will bee a precedent for the like misery in
England, taught by our example to be more wise. Or upon the other part,
we shall by this invasion bee constrayned furiously, and without order, to
breake into England, which we beleeve is their more earnest desire, because
a more speedy execution of their designe: For we doubt not but upon our
comming, clamours will bee raysed, posts sent, and Proclamations made
through the Kingdome, to slander our pious and just intentions, as if this
had been our meaning from the beginning, To stirre up all the English
against us, that once being entred in blood, they may with their owne
swords, extirpat their own Religion, lay a present foundation with their
own hands for building of Rome, in the midst of them, and be made the
authors both of their own and our slavery, to continue for ever.
(The Intentions of the Army of the Kingdome
The authors were clearly making the case that their hand was being forced; they
had no choice but to enter England. If they did not enter England they would be
besieged by English forces on land and sea, intent on forcibly altering their religion.
They did this, however, not just for themselves, but also to save their potential
English allies from their own inevitable religious suppression. The Scots were
aware they would be painted as an invading horde, but continued to stress that
nothing could be further from the truth; their intentions were pious and just.
It is possible that at the same time as the Scots were printing material aimed at
quieting the fears of the English people they were also engaged in a more
clandestine manipulation of the English authorities. In a letter dated 3 August
1640, to the Secretary of State Francis Windebank, Edward Viscount Conway,
the commander of the English forces in the north, wrote:
You yesterday received another letter from Sir John Conyers wherein he
says the same person did write that Carr had returned with a bond wherein
63 noblemen and gentlemen had bound themselves to join with the Scots.
I am absolutely of opinion that both these letters were counterfeit, sent only
to deceive us, and to make us suspect ourselves. Neither do I believe the
Scots will come into England; this that they do is only to brag; but, however,
I will look to myself as well as a man may that has no money in his purse.
I would send for more of the foot from Selby but I fear unpaid soldiers more
than I do the Scots, and the Devil to boot – God keep you from all three.
(Hamilton 1880, pp. 548–549)
If Conway’s suspicions concerning the authenticity of these letters were true then
it is probable that the Scots were attempting to spread doubt and fear among the
English command. Indeed, if true, this shows a fascinating divergence in approach
to the manipulation of the emotions of the English public and armed forces. The
authors of the publicly available printed works seen above were engaged in clear
attempts to elicit sympathy from the English, and to highlight the commonalities
between the English and Scots, while at the same time emphasising their differences.
These differences, however, merely allowed for a greater bond between the two
nations, based on love and respect. In private, however, the approach was rather
different, and the authors of those letters attempted to manipulate the fears of the
English forces so as to reduce their willingness to fight a clearly prepared force.
Such an attempt is less likely to have reached the common man and woman, and
if it had it would have come from the English authorities themselves, and could
be responded to from Scotland with the aforementioned public expression of
love and friendship. If the letters described above were in fact attempts to spread
fear and doubt then this shows a clearly thought out strategy towards the subtle
manipulation of English emotions at all levels of society.
Interestingly, Conway’s belief that the Scots would not enter England was not
shared by all. On 11 August 1640 Sir Jacob Astley wrote to Conway:
I think the Scots had better advance a good way into Northumberland
without resistance than we send this army to encounter them without pay;
for then, without all question, they will prove more ravenous upon the
country than the Scots, who, for their own ends and to gain a party here, I
believe will give the country all the fair quarter that may be, which our men
neither can nor will do.
(Gardiner 1884, pp. 185–186)
Astley, at least, seemed to believe that the Scots truly did intend to prevent their
soldiers committing any atrocities, and that this level of self-control may well
endear them to the common English man and woman.
A further example of the more subtle manipulation of English fears can be seen
from a letter dated 15 August 1640 from Sir John Clavering to Conway:
My son like a young man more forward than wise, without any advice from
me or assurance from them, ventured into their camp at Chouseley Wood,
and by means of some acquaintance had a sight of their general and other
nobles who were then going to a council of war at Dunse Castle on
Wednesday afternoon last. He went to their camp where he had a particular
view of each regiment, 196 in number, and eight more expected, which,
they tell him, shall no sooner come than they are to march for England, still
declaring how little harm they intend in their passage; and to make it more
prob[able they told] him they have provided 10,000 sheep and 500 beasts,
with a fortnights provision for all their army, and that they will bring with
them a canvas tent for every six soldiers, a free gift of their dear sisters of
Edinburgh, that they should not spoil the hedges and groves of any in
England.
(Hamilton 1880, p. 587)
While it is possible that the acquaintances of Clavering’s son truly believed in what
they told him, it could also be the case that this was a further attempt at the
manipulation of the English forces, and it certainly filtered through to Conway’s
command in the form of Clavering’s letter.4
The English, however, produced their own materials aimed at the manipulation
of people’s fear. On 20 August 1640, the day the Scots entered England, a piece
entitled ‘Leslie’s speech to his soldiers after they were passed the Tweed’ appeared:
Fellow soldiers and countrymen, give me leave to bid you heartily welcome
thus far. We are now with Caesar past the Rubicon, and this night you are
to lie on English ground. This is the land of promise, which as yet ye see
but afar off. Do but follow me, I will be your Joshua. Your turf cottages
you shall ere long exchange for stately houses, and let not the thought
of your wives and bearns and such like lumber which you leave behind
trouble you, for having done your business you shall have choice of English
lasses, whereon you may beget a new and better world. Was not their great
William the Conqueror a bastard? And in some things we are not inferior
to him, and will never despair of as great a fortune; nay, in many things we
have far greater advantages than that Norman duke, and shall we be such
dastards not to pursue them? At his first entrance he had no party to trust
to, but we have already many a fair town; yea, London itself is as sure to us
as the good town of Edinburgh. Their purses which have been shut to their
King, doubt not but you shall find open to you. The brethren, who have
in their hearts long since sworn the Covenant, are already providing change
of raiment for you and the sisters clean linen, and do but long for your
coming to fetch it. You have fast friends both in court and city, fathers,
brothers, and kindred that will employ their utmost ability to solicit your
cause, and if occasion be, their swords I trust shall be as ready to make way
for you, as your own. Our informations, our declarations, and especially our
late intentions are generally well liked of and approved by all. What remains
but that like true Scots we lay hold of this blessed opportunity. I shall
quickly bring you to the sight of gay coats, caps and feathers, goodly horses,
bonny lasses, fair houses. What shall I say? Win them and wear them. When
we are once in possession they shall know more of our minds. Return to
Scotland they that list for Leslie!
(Hamilton 1880, p. 612)
This is a fascinating piece, hence its reproduction in full. The piece is clearly aimed
at instilling fear in the English populace in opposition to the earlier Scottish
attempts to the contrary. The Scottish army, and indeed the Scottish nation as a
whole, were painted as contemporary Border Reivers, entering England to steal
clothes, money and English women. They had abandoned their wives and children,
indeed, they had abandoned their entire country. Why would they have returned
to Scotland once they had taken charge of England? Interestingly, the piece does
suggest a religious motive behind the invasion, in that Leslie was reported as telling
his army the hearts of many of the English had already signed the Covenant.
Perhaps in this instance to deny a religious motive would have been a step too far
for the intended audience, and would have led to the realisation that this was
propaganda? It is unfortunately unclear how widely this piece was disseminated.
Following their entry into England the Scots printed one last piece, The
Lawfulnesse of ovr Expedition into England Manifested, in which was reiterated:
It was not premeditate nor affected by us (God knows,) but our enemies
haue necessitat & redacted us unto it, & that of purpose to sowe the seed of
Nationall quarrels; yet as God hitherto hath turned all their plots against
themselves, and to effects quite contrary to those that they intended: so are
we hopefull, that our going into England, so much wished and desired by
our adversaries for producing a Nationall quarrel, shall so farre disappoint
them of their aymes, that it shall link the two Nations together in straiter &
stronger bonds both of civill and Christian love, then ever before.
(The Lawfulnesse of ovr Expedition into England
Manifested 1640, sig. A3r)
Once again the author of this piece was emphasising the Scottish friendship with
the English, even though the Scottish army had by this stage crossed the border.
However, they stressed to the English people that this was still done with
pious intent, and the side effect would be a strengthening of the bond between
the two nations and the victory of Protestantism over the plotting of their
Catholic adversaries.
After the battle

As was the case in the days and weeks leading up to the battle, following the
Scottish victory at Newburn there were several works printed, as well as
correspondence, relating to the events of late August 1640.
Very shortly after the battle, on 4 September 1640, a petition was sent to the
King from the Scottish commissioners of the disbanded parliament, in which was
stated:
That whereas through many sufferings, in this time past, Extream necessity
hath constrained us, for our reliefs, and obtaining our humble and just
desires, to come unto England; where according to our Intentions formerly
delivered, we have in all our Convoy, lived upon our own Means, Victuals
and Goods brought along with us; and nither troubling the Peace of the
Kingdom of England, nor hurting any of your Majesties Subjects of
whatsoever quality in their Persons or Goods, having carried ourselves in a
most peaceable manner, till we were pressed by strength of Arms to put such
forces out of the way, as did without our deservings, and (as some of them
at their point of death have confessed) against their own Consciences opposed
our peacable passage at Newburne upon Tine; and have brought their own
blood upon their own heads against our purposes and desires, expressed by
Letters sent to them at Newcastle.
(Rushworth 1659, p. 1255)
In a similar vein to those publications aimed at an English audience prior to the

battle, in this petition the Scottish commissioners highlighted the army’s good
carriage after entering England. True to their word they lived off their own
supplies, and only fought when prevented from crossing the Tyne. The petition
also stated, however, that those English that were captured or killed at Newburn
admitted to their own reluctance to fight the Scots, suggesting that their deaths
were the fault of the English, not the Scots. The Scots were clearly attempting to
absolve themselves of blame and guilt, while at the same time possibly attempting
to stir up feelings of guilt and remorse among the English. The petition went
on to state that, in order to prevent further violence and death, the Scots desired
access to the King, so that they could profess their loyalty, but also press him to
address their concerns regarding episcopacy, their true reason for entering England
in the first place. Charles, perhaps unsurprisingly, did not particularly believe these
claims (Rushworth 1659, pp. 1255–1256). However, in a letter of 2 September
1640 from the Scottish forces in England to the Earl of Lanrick, the Secretary of
Scottish affairs, the Scots stated:
Wee are debarred from sending or carring our suplications in ane ordinarey
way, wich makes ws to haue adresse to your Lordschips, earnistly intreatting
your (Lo:) in our names to present this our petition heirin inclosed to his
Matie, and in humility to bege ane anssuer therwnto, to be sent with the
bearir to ws, quho shall endeuor to approue ourselues his Maiesties loyall
subiectes, and most unwilling to shed aney christian blood, far lesse the
Englishe, quherof wee haue giuen werey good prouffe, by our bygane
carriadge, to euery one quho with violence hath opposed ws; zea euen to
thosse that entred in blood with us, and wer takin prissoners, quhom wee
haue lettin goe with meat and money. Notwithstanding that all thesse of
oures, quho did debord from ther quarters, are miserablie massacared by
these we can tearme no otherwayes then cutthrottes. Our behauior to thesse
that are in Neucastle can vittnes our intentions, wich is to liue at peace with
all, and rather suffer than offend.
(Balfour 1824, pp. 392–393)
Again, the Scots stressed their peaceable intentions and their desire for friendship
with the English, and suggested that this, along with an acknowledgement of their
grievances, was all that they were seeking. Of course, this letter was written to a
supporter of the King, and in support of a petition to Charles I, but it does seem
that the Scots genuinely went out of their way to make sure their actions in
England would endear them to the English.
It is interesting to note, and a possible result of Scottish attempts to endear
themselves to the common English people, as well as their occupation of parts of
Northern England, that following the defeat at Newburn the commanders of the
English forces continued to attempt to spread anti-Scottish propaganda. In a letter
of 10 September 1640 Captain Thomas Dymoke wrote to Windebank that early
on the day after the battle, 29 August 1640, ‘Newcastle was deserted by us and
possessed by the enemy, but Leslie and his guards did not enter till Sunday, where
he heard a sermon, and dining with the Mayor for requital turned him out of
doors and seized his house and goods to his own use’ (Hamilton 1882, p. 39).
Dymoke here was clearly attempting to suggest to Windebank that the Scots, and
in particular Leslie, behaved poorly following the occupation of Newcastle. Leslie’s
reported actions, however, seem unlikely, as the mayor of Newcastle, Robert
Bewick, was a puritan, and as such was likely to have sympathised with the
Scottish position (Terry 1899, p. 127, n. 1). Of course, this does not mean that
Leslie did not evict Bewick, and it is the sort of behaviour one might expect
during an occupation, but there are no other sources supporting this, so it is likely
that Dymock was attempting to reinforce the notion that the Scots were lying
about their intended treatment of the English, and had entered England as nothing
more than rebels.
Another interesting aspect of this conflict is that there was support for the
Scottish cause among the English population, and as such not everyone south of
the border was overly concerned by the Scottish presence. John Fenwick, an
English Presbyterian and supporter of the Covenant, wrote that when the Scottish
army approached Newburn:
there was flying indeed to purpose, the swiftest flight was the greatest
honour to the Newcastilian new dubd knights, a good Boat, a paire of Oares,
a good Horse, (especially that would carrie two men) was more worth then
the valour or honour of a new knighthood. Surely Vicar Alvey too would
have given his Vicaridge for a horse when he for haste leapt on horseback
behinde a countrie-man without a cushion, his faith and qualifications failing
him, he might well feare to fall from grace by the Scots coming.
(Fenwicke 1643, p. 4)
Fenwick painted a vivid picture of cowardice among the English forces and clergy
in Newcastle who fled before the Scots. This, however, was another work of
propaganda in that, while the English army and clergy did abandon Newcastle and
its citizens to the encroaching Scottish forces, it is probably not the case that they
did so two to a horse, offering their knighthoods in exchange for safe passage.
Indeed, Fenwick, although native to Newcastle, is unlikely to have seen these
scenes himself, as he had accompanied the Scottish army into England, having fled
to Scotland the previous year.
Perhaps the most interesting response to the Battle of Newburn came from the
Presbyterian minister Zachary Boyd. In 1643 Boyd produced The Battel of
Nevvbvrne: Where the Scots Armie obtained a notable victorie against the English Papists,
Prelats and Arminians, a work of poetry which a few lines in stated ‘At Newburn
foord, where brave Scots past the Tine / Under CHRISTS colours with courage
divine’ (Boyd 1643, p. 4). Boyd is not known for being a particularly skilful poet
but this piece is fascinating in another respect. Boyd seemed in some ways to be
exulting not only in the victory of the Scots over the English, but also in the
injuries and deaths that the English forces suffered:
Yea, legs and armes which in the air did flee

Were then cut of (like gibblets) fearfully:
The Scottish Bals so dash’d them with disdain;
That hips ov’rhead, their skul did spew their brain
Both legs and armes and heads, like dust, did flee
Into the air, with fearfull mutinie.
(Boyd 1643, p. 6)
It could, of course, merely be the case that Boyd was attempting to describe the
horrors of war in a particularly vivid fashion, and it was not his intention to glory
in the deaths of the English. However, considering that Boyd was a Covenanting
minister, the similarity of the imagery present in this work with that of the Last
Judgment is unlikely to be coincidental. Indeed, the main aim of this work was
describing the Scottish victory as that of God’s victory over those who would
corrupt true Christianity. This can be seen in the divine courage of the Scots
described previously, and throughout the piece as a whole, but it may also justify
the rather gruesome passage above. Perhaps, through their rejection of
Presbyterianism and the Covenant, the enemies of the Scots, indeed, the enemies
of Christ, were somehow de-humanised, and as such less deserving of pity. This
is reinforced by the line ‘All was made Hodge-Podge, some began to croole, /
Who fights for prelats is a beastly foole’ (Boyd 1643, p. 7). Other examples of
God’s intervention in the battle, and the nature of the battle itself, can be seen in
lines such as ‘Terrours from heaven made all the footmen flee / By an backside
with blushing infamie:’ (Boyd 1643, p. 8). and ‘Yea, Reek and Fire a great battell
did fight, The one for Darknesse, th’other for the Light’ (Boyd 1643, p. 10). It is
also interesting to note that Boyd, possibly to further emphasise the intervention
of God, or from a desire to heighten the drama of the battle, seemed to imply that
at one point the English had had the upper hand:
Thus stood the case, but God of heaven at last,

Fought for the Scots, so that their foes agast
Did flee with fear like Hindes before the Hounds,
Their back not face receiv’d most shamefull wounds.
(Boyd 1643, p. 12)
Throughout this work it is clear that Boyd firmly believed that God had given the
Scots a victory over the English as it was the Scots who were supporters of
Presbyterianism and the Covenant, and Boyd did not want the Scots to forget this.
In a section of the work addressed to Leslie, Boyd wrote; ‘To this great work
th’Almighty did thee raise, / He honour’d thee, but see that thou him praise’ (Boyd
1643, p. 16). Boyd was clearly telling Leslie, and indeed Scotland as a whole, that
he and they had only achieved victory over the English with the help of God.
This was an emotionally-driven plea from Boyd to the Scottish nation that they
should continue to thank God for that victory. Boyd feared that Leslie, the
Scottish army, and perhaps the Scottish nation as a whole would forget that their
victory came only through God, and he feared the result of not acknowledging
God’s role in the battle. As he subsequently noted, ‘We were not sav’d be Canons,
Spears, nor Swords, Or strength of men, the Battell was the LORDS’ (Boyd 1643,
p. 23). Should God not properly be praised, Boyd believed that the punishment
would be the defeat of the Scots, and the crushing of the Covenant, and as such
he stressed as much in this work.
Later representations of the battle

Another noteworthy aspect of the emotional responses to the Battle of Newburn
was the fact that such responses continued to be produced for so long after the
battle itself. Zachary Boyd wrote about the battle three years after the fact, for
instance, and others wrote later still, such as David Buchanan who wrote on the
issues surrounding the Second Bishops’ War in 1645. Others, however, continued
to produce emotionally-charged accounts of the Battle of Newburn years and
even decades after the events of 1640.
Patrick Gordon, writing at some point between 1647 and 1660, stated:
the king hoppt weill of his armie, throw the confidence he had in his
leadders; as also, that the bodie of the people of which this armie was made
vp was not yet infected, nether ware they capable of those deipe misteries
and high plots which, as strong and euer rolleing wheilles, careid along this
ingeine of the Couenant. But the malitius influence of his vnlucky stares, or
the hard fortune which had euer followed so good a man, so pius, so
mercifull a judge, and so wise and so excellent an king, did in this action
make knowin how he was deserted, yes, and betrayed, euen of those in
whom he had greatest confidence.
(Gordon 1844, p. 33)
Gordon portrayed Charles I as a pious, devout man, who had the misfortune to be
betrayed by those close to him, but also by the failures of his army and its leaders,
due, perhaps, to the effectiveness of the Scottish attempts at emotional manipulation.
This was a turn of events that Gordon clearly hoped would elicit some sympathy
from his audience. He subsequently noted of the defeat of the English:
This greiued the good king so extreamely, that vpon the instant intreattie
of the nobilitie, and large promises to sie all things redressed to his full
contentment, and the Couenanters exactlye punished, he grantes them a
parlement; and because the sinceritie and candor of his innocent soule could
not harbour a thought, nor giue him libertie to beleeue, that vnder there
many oaths and promises of fidelitie there could lurke any falshood or
deceat, he grantes power to sitt ay and whill all things ware fullie pacefied,
and a perfyt establishment of gouernement in both kingdoms satled; which,
it seems, they had secretly concluded sould neuer be in his tyme.
(Gordon 1844, p. 33)
Again, in this passage Gordon portrayed Charles I as a pious, innocent man, who
could not conceive of the concept of falsehood, an attestation that was probably
just as hard to believe at the time of writing as it is today. Nevertheless, for Gordon
Charles I was the one who was truly deserving of sympathy and pity, as he had
been duped and abused by the rebellious Covenanters. However, Gordon did not
write this account only from a sense of devotion to Charles I and the crown.
Rather, this account stemmed from a desire to refute the accusations of the
Covenanters, as well as the Scottish Anglican bishop George Wishart, that Patrick
Gordon’s chief, the Marquis of Huntly, was disloyal (Gordon 1844, pp. xi–xii;
Wishart 1819). This in itself is fascinating, as it highlights the fact that there was
not necessarily a clear delineation of sides in this conflict. Gordon wrote an
emotional account of the events of 1640, portraying the Scots as the rebellious
aggressors, and Charles I as a devout, innocent Christian, as a response to a work
produced by another supporter of the King and episcopacy.5
Edward Hyde, the first Earl of Clarendon, probably began writing his account
around 1646, apparently at the earlier behest of Charles I. It would not be finished
for many years, however, and did not appear in print until 1702, almost three
decades after his death. Concerning the defeat of the English he stated that the
Scots ‘put our whole Army to the most shameful and confounding Flight that was
ever heard of’ (Hyde 1717, pp. 144–145). It is interesting to note the allusion to
shame over a defeat that had taken place possibly as much as 30 years earlier.
Indeed, Hyde seems to have taken the defeat almost as a personal affront, and was
keen to place the blame for this embarrassment squarely upon the English
command. He stated:
The Lord Conway never after turning his Face towards the Enemy, or doing
any thing like a Commander, though his Troops were quickly brought
together again, without the loss of a dozen men, and were so asham’d of
their Flight, that they were very willing as well as able to have taken what
Revenge they would upon the Enemy, who were possess’d with all the fears
imaginable, and would hardly believe their own success, till they were
assur’d that the Lord Conway with all his Army rested quietly in Durham,
and then they presum’d to enter into New-Castle.
(Hyde 1717, pp. 145)
It was clearly very important for Hyde to stress that the victory of the Scots
shocked them as much as it did the English. The Scots were portrayed as still
fearing the English even after they had fled, and refusing to enter Newcastle until
they knew that the English would not retaliate. The English, on the other hand,
were painted as quickly regaining their composure after a brief withdrawal, and as
being eager to return and exact revenge upon the Scots. Of course, in reality, the
English lost more than a dozen men, and the Scots can hardly be said to have been
terrified. Had they so desired they could have chased the English down and
destroyed them, but were constrained from doing so by Leslie, who held to the
earlier promises of minimising violence, and preferring to capture rather than kill
(Terry 1899, p. 120). For Hyde, however, it was important that the decision not
to pursue the English came from fear. In Hyde’s mind the Scots feared the English,
and the English were defeated through the shameful actions of their commanders.
Possibly the most fascinating of the later accounts of the Battle of Newburn
comes initially from a manuscript history completed in 1679 by James Somer-
ville, by right the eleventh Lord Somerville. Somerville’s father, also James
Somerville, had been a part of the Covenanter army under Leslie, but following
the execution of Charles I in 1649 he had begun to rethink his political beliefs,
and it is highly likely that he passed these new beliefs onto his son. Indeed, in his
Memorie of The Somervilles Charles I was described as ‘soe religious and generous a
prince, whose favours was as watter spilt upon the ground to that untoward and
ungrate generatione’ (Somerville 1815, p. 208). Clearly the younger of the
Somervilles agreed with Patrick Gordon that Charles I was a pious and innocent
man. What is of particular interest, however, is the way in which Somerville
described the result of the battle. In his account the English engaged in ‘A vile
and shamefull retreat, altogither unworthy of men of honour, as most of them
wer . . .’ (Somerville 1815, p. 204). From the likes of Edward Hyde, or possibly
even Patrick Gordon, this statement would have been completely understandable
and expected, but Somerville’s father had been part of Leslie’s army. Although his
politics changed later in life it still seems strange that his son would go so far as to
describe the flight of the English as shameful. For Somerville, however, there were
other considerations. As he had stated earlier in the text, the actions of the
Covenanters were unforgivable, as ‘ther being noe lawes sacred or human to
warrand subjects to take up arms against their prince, upon any account, whether
religious or civill’ that could possibly excuse the events of 1640 (Somerville 1815,
p. 201). For Somerville, even as a Scot, the actions of the Covenanters were
wrong and rebellious. The English defeat was shameful in that they failed to
prevent the Scottish occupation of Northern England, an act of aggression against
the rightful king. Additionally, setting aside international politics, as a member
of the aristocracy Somerville would have believed that the English commanders
should not have retreated, even in the face of defeat, as that was not what was
done by ‘men of honour’. Their retreat was shameful, and their shame was clearly
felt by other members of the aristocracy, such as Somerville, despite his father’s
role in the battle.
Conclusion
As has been argued throughout this chapter the Battle of Newburn was a significant
event in many ways, and not least in the emotions it created, curated, inspired and
manipulated on both sides of the conflict. In letters, literature, history and official
proclamations, emotions were present but also presented to the audience, and this
was done in order to foster certain responses to the battle, both before and after
the fact.
Prior to the battle there were attempts made by the Scots to reduce fears the
English people may have had, but also to engender in them a spirit of friendship
and neighbourly love. This was done in order to reduce any resistance they may
have met upon crossing the border, but also from a genuine desire for friendlier
relations between the two nations, based upon a shared understanding of religion.
The Scots not only desired tolerance of their own religious choices, they also
wanted their closest neighbours to understand their earnest desires that this be the
case. The Scots entered England not as invaders, but as supplicants to a king who
would not hear them, and they tried desperately to convince the northern English
of this. The English attempted to counter this with propaganda depicting the Scots
as an invading horde hell-bent on destruction, thereby stirring up the fears of a
people who had heard tales of old of the behaviour of their supposedly barbarous
neighbours to the north. The Scots in turn endeavoured to spread fear through
the English command with the size of their force and attempts to convince the
English that many of their number had joined with the Scots, in order to weaken
their resolve and instil a reluctance to meet the expeditionary force.
After the battle, the Scots continued in their strategies to quieten the fears of
the English populace, particularly as they were now there as an occupying force,
but they also attempted to convince the King they truly wanted nothing more
than to profess their loyalty and to have their grievances heard. Again, on both
sides of the conflict there were attempts to describe the opposing force in
unflattering terms; in at least one instance the English were portrayed by an
English supporter of the Scots as cowards who had abandoned those they were
charged with defending, and the Scots were portrayed as ungracious conquerors.
Within Scotland the Scots were reminded by Zachary Boyd of their debt to God
for the victory of the Covenanters at Newburn Ford, as it was in defence of the
Covenant that had caused them to cross the border in the first place.
What is particularly interesting in this case is for how long emotional accounts
of the battle continued to be produced. That accounts were produced by many
people for years and decades to come is not surprising at all; this was an international
conflict at a time of unrest and political uncertainty. What is surprising is that in
at least one instance an account was produced four decades after the battle that
still described the defeat as shameful. Forty years after the battle the English were
being told that they should still feel ashamed of their defeat. Even more fascinating
is that this came from a Scottish account, but not one aimed at reminding the
English of their defeat from a position of pride, but rather a position of solidarity.
Somerville shared the English shame at their defeat. The emotions inspired by the
Bishops’ Wars, the Battle of Newburn, and the period of conflict that led to the
Wars of the Three Kingdoms were clearly profound, and had an effect that could
be seen in writings decades and centuries later.6 Somerville may have been
attempting to affect the emotions of those who had allowed, as he saw it, a rebel
force to defeat those loyal to the king, but he himself was inspired by the lingering
emotional responses to a decades-old battle.
Notes
1 I would like to thank the Australian Research Council for funding the Postdoctoral
Fellowship (project number CE110001011) from which this chapter has been drawn.
2 For an in-depth account of the battle and surrounding events see Terry (1899,
pp. 88–138).
3 For a much more detailed study of these events see, for example, Stevenson (1973), or
Fissel (1994).
4 John Rushworth, writing in 1659, certainly believed that this was an attempt at
emotional manipulation (Rushworth 1659, p. 1236).
5 The opposing sides in the Bishop’s Wars, and, indeed the subsequent conflicts known
as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, were not simply a matter of Scotland and England,
or Covenanter and Royalist. They went deeper than that, and allegiances could and did
shift and change dependant on various factors, including politics, religion, and personal
gain. Lewis Gordon, the fourth Marquis of Huntly, typified these shifting allegiances,
fighting for the Royalists during the First Bishop’s War, and for both the Royalists and
Covenanters at different stages of the Scottish Civil War, which led to subsequent
accusations of disloyalty to the King. That Patrick Gordon wrote his work as a response
to the accusations of a fellow Royalist shows that even within the same camp there were
different factions, and following the Restoration these conflicts surfaced once more.
The emotional bond Patrick Gordon shared with his clan chief was clearly stronger than
the religious bond shared with George Wishart, and his loyalty towards the Marquis of
Huntly could be expressed following the Restoration.
6 In 1913 James King Hewison wrote of the shameful flight of the English and noted the
honour of the Scots who buried their fallen foemen (Hewison 1913, p. 350).
Reference list
Balfour, J. 1824, The Historical Works, vol. 2, Edinburgh.
Boyd, Z. 1643, The Battel of Nevvbvrne: Where the Scots Armie obtained a notable victorie against
the English Papists, Prelats and Armininians, the 28 day of August, 1640, Wing-B142,
George Anderson, Glasgow.
Buchanan, D. 1645, Truth its Manifest: or, A short and true Relation of divers main passages of
things (in some whereof the Scots are particularly concerned) from the very first beginning of these
unhappy Troubles to this day, London.
Fenwicke, J. 1643, Christ Ruling in midst of his Enemies; or, Some first Fruits of the Churches
Deliverance, Wing F719, Benjamin Allen, London.
Fissel, M. C. 1994, The Bishops’ Wars: Charles I’s Campaigns Against Scotland, 1638–1640,
Gardiner, S. R. 1884, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of Civil
War, 1603–1642, vol. 9, Longmans, Green & Co., London.
Gordon, P. 1844, A Short Abridgement of Britane’s Distemper, from the yeare of God
M.DC.XXXIX. to M.DC.XLIX, Printed for the Spalding Club, Aberdeen.
Hamilton, W. D. (ed.) 1880, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of
Charles I, 1640, Longmans & Co., London.
Hamilton, W. D. (ed.) 1882, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of
Charles I, 1640–41, Longmans & Co., London.
Hewison, J. K. 1913, The Covenanters, a History of the Church in Scotland from the Reformation
to the Revolution, vol. 1, 2nd edn, John Smith & Son, Glasgow.
Hyde, E. 1717, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, Begun in the Year 1641,
vol. 1, part 1, Printed at the Theatre, Oxford.
Information from the Estaits of the kingdome of Scotland, to the kingdome of England, 1640, STC-
21916, J. Bryson, Edinburgh.
Information from the Scottish Nation, to all the true English, concerning the present Expedition, 1640,
STC-21917, Edinburgh.
Rushworth, J. 1659, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, vol. 3, London.
Somerville, J. 1815, Memorie of The Somervilles; being a History of the Baronial House of
Somerville, vol. 2, James Ballantyne & Co., Edinburgh.
Stevenson, D. 1973, The Scottish Revolution 1637–1644: the Triumph of the Covenanters,
David & Charles, Newton Abbot.
Terry, C. S. 1899, The Life and Campaigns of Alexander Leslie, First Earl of Leven, Longmans,
Green & Co., London.
The Intentions of the Army of the Kingdome of Scotland, Declared to their Brethren of England, By
the Commissioners of the late Parliament, and by the Generall, Noblemen, Barons, and others,
Officers of the Army, 1640, STC-21919, Robert Bryson, Edinburgh.
The Lawfulnesse of ovr Expedition into England Manifested, 1640, STC-219235, Robert Bryson,
Edinburgh.
Wishart, G. 1819, Memoirs of the Most Renowned James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, Archibald
Constable & Co., Edinburgh.
Taylor & Francis
10
‘THIS HUMBLE MONUMENT
OF GUILTLESS BLOOD’
The emotional landscape of
Covenanter monuments1
Dolly MacKinnon
A striking woodcut (Figure 10.1) from Alexander Shields’s account of the sufferings
of the Church of Scotland during the second half of the seventeenth century
depicts the gruesome fate of Presbyterian martyrs between 1660 and 1685. Such
‘cruelty’ met out by a tyrannical King and parliament was detailed in his evocatively
titled A Hind let loose, or, An Historical Representation of the Testimonies, Of the
Church of Scotland, for the Interest of Christ, with the true State thereof in all its Periods
(Preface, A3). Shields (1687, front matter) stated that, ‘Some had yr hands struck
off & hanged others beheaded. Some hanged & quartered Some Tortured by boots
thumbkins firematches. Some taken & instantly shot in fields. Some banished,
others perished in ship-wrack. women hanged, others drowned at stakes in the
sea’. The men and women who died as martyrs demonstrated that ‘the Courage
and Zeal of the Lovers of Christ was blazing’, for ‘the more they were afflicted
the more they grew . . . the more did the number of Witnesses multiply . . . so
that the then shed blood of the Martyrs became the seed of the Church . . .’
(Shields 1692, p. 31; 1687, pp. 196–197). For Shields, the fight for Reformation
in seventeenth-century Scotland was ongoing and caused by the
Miseries & Mischiefs, that the pride of Prelacy and Tyrannical Supremacy
had multiplied beyond measure upon this Church & Nation, and at the
hight of all their haughtiness, when they were setting up their Dagon [a
Philistine national deity from the Bible depicted as a fish-tailed man], and
erecting Altars for him, imposing the Service Book, [introduced in Scotland
in 1637] and the book of Canons &c. the Lord in Mercy remembered His
people, and surprised them with a sudden unexpected Deliverance, by very
despicable means.
(1687, p. 61)
164 Dolly Mackinnon
FIGURE 10.1 Frontispiece, [Alexander Shields] A Hind let loose, or An Historical

Representation of the Testimonies, of the Church of Scotland, for the Interest of
Christ, with the true State thereof in all its Periods: Together With A
Vindication of the present Testimonie, against the Popish, Prelatical, &
Malignant Enemies of that Church . . . : Wherein Several Controversies of
Greatest Consequence are enquired into, and in some measure cleared; concerning
hearing of the Curats, owning of the present Tyrannie, taking of ensnaring
Oaths & Bonds, frequenting of field meetings, Defensive Resistence of
Tyrannical Violence . . . / By a Lover of true Liberty. ([Edinburgh], 1687).
Source: Union Theological Seminary (New York, N. Y.) Library.
This chapter focuses upon those members of the more extreme Covenanters,
known as Cameronians, an emotional and spiritual congregation specifically
associated with field conventicles and martyrdom, and named after the field
preacher Richard Cameron (c.1648–1680) who was killed at Ardsmoss. This
Cameronian community existed within a more moderate community of Pres-
byterians. From the mighty to the humble, the Cameronians were united in their
struggle to complete a thorough Reformation in Scotland, which also saw their
opposition to the Union of 1707. For them, Scottish identity hinged on an
allegiance to King Jesus, and not to a mortal monarch ruling over three kingdoms
with an Episcopalian church government. The Cameronians saw ‘even the
opposition of a few weak women, at the begining of that Contest, which, ere it
Covenanter monuments 165
was quashed, made the Tyrant tumble headless off his throne’ (Shields 1687,
p. 61). According to this emotional community, martyrdom was God’s gift to
them. As such, their printed testimonies, and their physical monuments to their
fallen martyrs, placed in the Scottish landscape over subsequent generations, marked
their emotional practices within the Scottish landscape.
The inscription language of Covenanter monuments can be treated, in
conjunction with the language of written and printed testimonies, as evidence of
a continuing emotional community that reads Scottish national history in terms
of the fate of the national Covenant, and those martyrs who died for it. This
community is created and recreated through the acts and the effects of memoria-
lisation, and the sharing of the language of the national covenant, reformation,
blood and grace in the name of King Jesus. This chapter analyses the powerful
emotions connected with silence, memory and remembrance by focusing on three
case studies of memorialisation to individual Covenanter martyrs: William Gordon
(1679), Airdsmoss (1680) and the Wigtown Martyrs (1685). The Cameronians
relied upon word of mouth, print culture, the erection of memorial stones
containing uniform inscriptions, as well as trans-generational memory (where
memories, over time, were transformed through retelling into the remembering)
of the performance of their emotions. Their forms of memorial (unmarked and
marked stones, as well as print culture) constructed a virtual emotional religious
community that, devoid of a Kirk to worship in, was an emotional expression of
their conscience practised in the illegal conventicles held in the private houses,
fields and rugged terrain of early modern lowland Scotland under constant threat
of discovery. The key stages of this emotional community I discuss includes the
following: the deaths of the martyrs; their recognition as martyrs and the emotional
and physical marking (frequently through the use of traditional unmarked stones)
of their place of murder; the marked and printed memorialisation practices of
the following generations and the ongoing reverence and rehabilitation of the
persecuted covenantors in the centuries afterwards in the formation of Scottish
national identity.
From a methodological standpoint, this chapter takes the innovative work
of Monique Scheer who articulated the potential of ‘emotional practice’ as a
framework for analysing and understanding emotions in action (Scheer 2012,
p. 193). Emotions are not simply internal entities, for, as the philosophical work
of Robert C. Solomon has challenged us, emotions are ‘not entities in con-
sciousness’ but rather ‘acts of consciousness’; emotions are not something we ‘just
have’, but rather they ‘are indeed something we do’ (Solomon 2007 cited in
Scheer 2012, p. 194). As Scheer (2012, p. 211) notes ‘emotional practices can be
carried out alone, but they are frequently embedded in social settings’. In order
for emotional practice to function within emotional communities, they must be
actively ‘mobilizing, naming, communicating and regulating emotions’ (Scheer
2012, pp. 193, 209–220). Emotional practices ‘are stored in the habitus, which
provides socially anchored responses to others’ and ‘is dependent and intertwined’
166 Dolly Mackinnon
with speaking, gesturing, remembering, manipulating objects, and perceiving . . .

spaces’ (Scheer 2012, pp. 209, 211). All of these elements are dynamic in emotional
ritual practices ‘as a means of achieving, training, articulating, and modulating
emotional for personal as well as social purposes’ (Scheer 2012, p. 210). As this
chapter demonstrates, those emotional practices are dynamic, and occur within
short and long timeframes. Scheer concludes that ‘centuries of reflection on the
effects of observing others’ bodies and voices on the stage, on the soapbox, or in
the pulpit have elaborated, refined, and revised emotional practices’ (2012,
p. 211). My analysis of emotional practice centres of the Cammeronian community
of Covenanters in order to reconstruct and identify ‘the specific situatedness of
. . . [their] doings’, as well as ‘look at bodies and artifacts on . . . [their] past’
(Scheer 2012, p. 217).
The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 had reinstated Episcopacy, and dismantled
the Solemn League and Covenant that were pivotal pieces in the Covenanter
Revolution of 1650 (Stewart 2016). The fiscal punishments, executions, banish-
ments they experienced under the law, as well as the summary executions,
especially in the 1680s, created a culture of fear. For those Covenanters who
refused to declare their allegiance to the King, death was the penalty. For those
emotional communities affected, living memory kept the names of their dead,
albeit spoken in hushed and revered tones, on the lips of the living, for survivors
had a duty to remember. A stone was placed to mark the place of the site of the
burial, until such time – years, decades, even centuries later – a monument with
an inscription might be erected, or in some cases replaced. This traditional practice
of marking death in the landscape was a shared common response to sudden death
(Maddrell 2015). For example, the Reverend Mr Robert Laws (1818, p. 230)
recounted the case of a ‘dragoon [who accidentally shot himself] . . . through the
heart’ after he had stopped at the roadside ‘to ease nature’. Laws (1818, p. 230)
added that ‘he is buried where he died, and a small heap of stones cast upon him,
as a remembrance of that fact’. Here death is given a material marker through the
placement of stones of remembrance, which were intended to commit the event
to memory, and to mark this lesson in the emotional landscape of the community.
No inscription was necessary, as word of mouth communicated the tragic event,
while the stones marked the spot.
It was therefore a collective and calculated endeavour by the Cameronians to
utilise the traditional practices of religious martyrdom for their memorialisation.
First, they collected accounts of the martyrs that were printed as their last
testamentary statements. The emotional material culture of the godly, comprising
swords, bibles and the military banners of the Christian soldiers were kept secretly
by families. The places of summary execution and martyrdom, were committed
to memory and identified by unmarked stones. If funeral monuments were later
erected to these martyrs, together with inscriptions, they often incorporated the
emotional symbols of the sword and the bible onto the stone. These emotional
practices were initiated at and ratified by the general meetings of the covenanting
communities that remained alive.
The creation of both unmarked and marked graves, during a period of on-
going persecution was entirely contingent upon the religious and political climate
of fear. In this context fear was related not only to calamity and danger, but also
to the capacity to revere the dead (MacKinnon 2016, pp. 157–175; Bähr 2013,
pp. 269–282; Eber 1997, pp. 62–77). Only when the political climate allowed
could formal monuments to these Covenanter martyrs be erected, by those who
held memories of these events, and gathered the funds and support necessary to
place these memorial stones in the landscape. Communities at the time and over
time actively collected personal accounts of the sufferings from the living in the
affected communities across Western Scotland, and printed these texts of their
sufferings for the spiritual benefit of the emotional communities that survived. The
blood of martyrs had seeped into the cobblestones and soil of urban and rural sites
marking the places where stones of remembrance would be placed. Over time,
these stones were then replaced with inscriptions, from the beginning of the
eighteenth century onwards.
Covenanter historiography
The radical Covenanters have been the subject of intense interest from scholars,
and in intervening centuries they have also engendered emotional responses
through the rhetoric used to describe their history in literary and historical terms.
For example, the stereotypical Covenanter appeared, in a literary form, in Sir
Walter Scott’s 1816 depiction of a real individual that Scott called ‘Old Mortality’,
who frequented the ‘deserted mansion of the dead’ (1816, p. 6). Scott’s emotional
encounter described
an old man. . . seated upon the monument of the slaughtered Presbyterians,

and, busily employed in deepening, with his chisel, the letters of the
inscription, which, announcing, in scriptural language, the promised blessing
of futurity to be the lot of the slain, anathematized the murderers with
corresponding violence.
(1816, p. 6)
The old man’s violent words and speech act as a metaphor, not only for the
restoration of the monuments, but also for the renewal and regeneration of the
emotional practice of remembering these martyrs. Through the act of deepening
the inscription, the emotional practice of the scriptural language is reanimated,
and the ‘promised blessing of futurity’ of the slain remembered, while with each
hit of the chisel the old man ‘anathematized’ their ‘murderers with corresponding
violence’. Scott also acknowledges the emotional zeal of ‘Old Mortality’s endevors’:
‘He considered himself as fulfilling a sacred duty, while renewing to the eyes of
posterity the decaying emblems of the zeal and sufferings of their forefathers, and
thereby trimming, as it were, the beacon-light which was to warn future generations
168 Dolly Mackinnon
to defend their religion even unto blood’ (1816, p. 7). The beacon-light once
trimmed, burns more brightly. Scott in his text used the terms found in the
seventeenth and eighteenth-century Covenanter monument inscriptions, such as
‘blood’, ‘sufferings and religion’ and ‘murdered’.
In 1844, the painter Thomas Duncan portrayed the shocking events of the
summary execution of John Brown (in 1685) in an intensely-emotional depiction
of Brown’s dead body and that of his dead dog lying in front of his distraught wife
and children.2 The emotional layers of Brown’s murder were added to and
exemplified with each reiteration of the tale over the intervening centuries. In
1937, Agnes Mure Mackenzie recounted her emotions as a school child when she
first encountered Brown’s story from May 1685, at the height of the ‘Killing
Times’. MacKenzie (1937, p. 261) wrote of that ‘famous case of John Brown, over
whose death, as recorded in popular fiction, many readers of this book will have
wept, as did its writer, in their schooldays . . .’. MacKenzie’s account demonstrates
how the retelling of the Covenanter’s executions perpetuated this emotional
practice over time. Each retelling provided an emotional touchstone in the creation
of Scotland’s national past in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
emotional language of grace attending martyrdom for the true faith created and
embraced this emotional community of readers in a debate about nineteenth
and twentieth-century Scottish faith and nationalism.
Previous studies have either catalogued these Covenanter memorials, or referred
to them, as part of the nineteenth-century rehabilitation of the Covenanters for
the purposes of the creation of Scottish identity. For example, James J. Coleman
in Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-century Scotland: Commemoration, Nationality
and Memory (2014) has discussed how, from the nineteenth century onwards,
‘different localities within Scotland invoked Covenanting memory as a means of
celebrating their own contribution to Scotland’s nationality’ for the express purposes
of defining Scottish identity and nationalism in the present (Coleman 2014,
pp. 135–153; Pentland, Nixon & Robert 2012, pp. 28–49). Antiquarians too,
have recorded these monuments and their inscriptions for posterity, most notably
J. H. Thomson’s Martyr Graves of Scotland (1881). Couched in the form of a
handbook that sits comfortably in the palm of the hand, James Gibson’s Inscriptions
on the Tombstone and Monuments Erected in Memory of the Covenanters, with Historical
Introduction and Notes (1881) enabled readers to conduct their own personal
pilgrimages across the landscape (physical, spiritual and metaphorical) to these
remote places of emotion, and gather with others in prayer to remember their
martyrs. Most recently in the twentieth century, Thorbjörn Campbell’s Standing
Witnesses: An Illustrated Guide to the Scottish Covenanters (1996) provided a survey
as part of, and in response to, ‘repeated calls . . . for the cataloguing of war
memorials throughout the United Kingdom because of their rapid deterioration’
(1996, p. vii). Magnus Magnusson (2000, p. 486) observed that ‘there are scores
of sad, proud and often neglected monuments and headstones all over Scotland
commemorating the martyrs to the Covenant during the ‘Killing Time’ (1685).
These are monuments to religious wars. As I have shown elsewhere, the emotional
practice of constructing memorials, as well as the conflicts surrounding the form
those memorials to past battles took, coincided with points of religious and political
crisis in the present (MacKinnon 2016, p. 208). Covenanter memory in the
immediate aftermath of the events of the 1680s, demonstrates these emotional
communities continuing to struggle to achieve the supremacy of King Jesus, over
what they understood to be the false claims of King, parliament, and the 1707
Union.
In analysing the evolution of the early practice of memorialisation that occurred
in these emotional communities in the immediate aftermath of the Killing Times
(1685), I can demonstrate the emotional practice of the Covenanters. Using the
specific case studies of William Gordon (1679), Airdsmoss (1680) and the Wigtown
Martyrs (1685), I trace these practices within the Covenanters from the late
seventeenth into the early eighteenth centuries. I also analyse the inscription texts
purposefully created for these monuments to male and female martyrs. The lens
of emotional practice informs my methodology and is applied to both the archives
and material cultural evidence within the Scottish landscape.
Emotions methodology
Barbara H. Rosenwein (2006, p. 15) has demonstrated how emotional communities
in the Middle Ages valued the collective importance of emotional states in societies,
showing that ‘privilege or disregard’ was afforded to each emotion, and that each
community determined the ‘feeling rules’ they imparted to society. In dealing
with Covenanter communities historians ‘need to realize that certain communities
must share emotional styles if they are to communicate and understand each other’
(Rosenwein 2006, p. 15). What is also clear is that emotional communities are
linked to their landscapes through their emotional practices. It is in the Covenanter
emotional landscapes that the concept of their emotional practices – that is actions
driven by states of emotion – occur. For the Covenanters, this allows us to analyse
the emotional practices of a community that did not always leave direct written
testimony. Memories relive, in Monique Scheer’s sense, the ‘emotional practices’
of life that ‘make use of the capacities of a body trained by specific social settings
and power relations’ (2012, pp. 193–194). Central to this concept of emotional
practice are Scheer’s four types of emotional practice: mobilising, naming,
communicating and regulating emotion. Scheer’s contention is that ‘emotional
arousals that seem to be purely physical are actually deeply socialised’ (2012,
p. 220). Scheer (2012, p. 220) demonstrates that emotions ‘not only follow from
things people do, but are themselves a form of practice, because they are an action
of a mindful body’, and ‘that this feeling subject is not prior to but emerges in the
doing of emotion’. Here the individual is part of an emotional community in
Rosenwein’s sense, but a community where emotion, the mind, and the body
function as ‘a locus for innate and learned capacities deeply shaped by habitual
practices’ (Scheer 2012, p. 220).
170 Dolly Mackinnon
We must also consider how historians have, through their historical writing,
championed the experience of the individual over emotional communities with
respect to these violent episodes in Scottish history. For example, Michael Lynch,
in The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (2001) summarised the succession of
James VII and II, an ardent Catholic, and his government, as a period of vigorous,
and violent enforcement of religious conformity. The consequence of these state-
sanctioned actions was ‘to culminate in the frenzy of concentrated violence known
as the ‘Killing Times’ in which almost 100 individuals, nearly all belonging to
the radical Cameronian party, were summarily executed over a short period of
months in 1685’ (Lynch 2001, p. 114). Lynch (2001, p. 114) concluded that
‘the martyrology and mythology of the ‘Killing Times’ has often dominated the
historiography of this entire period despite that fact that it was a short-lived
aberration affecting only the adherents of one tiny Presbyterian faction’. Lynch
takes no account that these ‘almost 100 individuals’ were connected to their wider
families, as well as their religious communities, making the numbers of those
affected by these violent events in the hundreds. These events tore local com-
munities apart, through the process of summary executions, battles and government
pogroms, as well as the billeting of troops. The publication of texts recounting
these events from 1687 onwards offered an alternative view of the impact of these
conflicts on emotional communities, and the women, men and children who were
ultimately affected and traumatised by these religious wars. While Lynch claims
that the martyrology and mythology of the Killing Times has dominated, national
histories play down or forget these emotional events, while those directly affected
collectively and actively commemorated and remembered them in order to keep
the struggle for Reformed Scotland alive. What the political historians have
categorised as isolated and individual acts of violence actually generated an
emotional ripple and resonance that travelled well beyond those present at such
killings, and has fuelled the centuries following. Each individual was a family
member, a sibling, spouse, aunt, or uncle, grandparent, a cousin or a spiritual
friend. Let us now turn to the ways in which these communities performed their
emotions in the emotional landscape of their early modern present.
William Gordon of Earlston in Galloway 22 June 1679

The monument to William Gordon charts the process from silent stone to inscribed
monument between 1679 and 1772. William Gordon (d. 1679) was the Laird of
Earlston, Kirkcudbrightshire, and an ardent Covenanter. After the Restoration
of Charles II, he had refused to appoint an Episcopalian Incumbent to the Kirk,
and was known to have held conventicles and private meetings in his own house.
Shortly after the Battle of Bothwell Bridge (1679), where the Covenanters were
overwhelmingly defeated by government forces, Gordon was apprehended by
government troops. After refusing to comply with their requests, Gordon was
summarily shot, and as there was no family present, his body was interred in the
local Kirkyard. Initially, a pillar was erected with no inscription. Gordon’s

monument is an example of that process of trans-generational commemoration
recounted in the text of the monument’s inscription erected by Gordon’s great
grandson, Sir John Gordon, Bart. The inscription reads, ‘To the memory of the
very Worthy Pillar of the Church, M William Gordon of Earlston in Gallo-way’.
Gordon had been ‘Shot by a partie of dragoons on his way to Bothwell bridge,
22 June. 1679. Aged 65’, and the monument was ‘inscribed by this great grand-
son, Sir John Gordon, Bart, [on] 11 June 1772’ during the period of the American
War of Independence. The Covenanters represented a character of defiance against
the tyranny that influenced Europe and North America, and fuelled republican
sentiment. The initial absence of an inscription on this monument was explained
as ‘Silent till now full ninety years hath stood, This humble Monument of Guiltless
Blood’. The politically volatile times due to ‘Tyranick Sway, forbad his Fate to
name Least his known Worth should prove the Tyrant’s shame’. Gordon’s ‘Godly’
purpose for the completion of an ongoing reformation was made clear by the
inscription, for
On Bothwell road with love of Freedon fir’d, The Tyrant’s minions boldly
him require’d. To stop and yield, or it his life would cost. This he disdain’d
not knowing all was lost [that the Covenanters had lost the battle at Bothwell
Bridge]. On which they fir’d. Heaven so decreed His doom. Far from his
own laid in this silent Tomb.
His death and silent tomb were marked by his emotional community who fought
on. The remainder of the inscription continues, ‘How leagu’d with Patriots to
maintain the Cause[.] Of true RELIGIOUS LIBERTY and Laws’. Gordon’s
martyrdom was demonstrated by his characteristics as a martyr, and evident by
‘How learn’d, how soft his manner, free from Pride, How clear his Judgement,
and how he liv’d and dy’d’. The emotional practice of the Covenanter community,
was demonstrated by those witnesses who knew ‘They well cou’d tell who
weeping round him stood[.] On Strevan plains that drank his Patriot Blood’.
This eighteenth-century inscription is a highly emotional call to the collective
emotional practices of those Covenanters that live on. Here the blood of martyrs
seeps into the landscape and signifies the emotional memory of death, and the
utilisation of the emotional language, such as ‘guiltless blood’ and martyrdom for
King Jesus Christ, that appeared on these monuments. The 1772 monument was
then, some 70 years later, ‘REPAIRED By Sir John Gordon Bart. Of Earlston. His
Representative, 1842’. This demonstrates the second and third trans-generational
reiterations of these emotional communities’ performances during the period of
the American War of Independence, and again at the period of the Disruption
of the Church of Scotland. First-hand memory, as well as remembering when
living memory has ceased, is dependent upon the emotional performances of
multiple generations of family and friends visiting these sites, in the following
172 Dolly Mackinnon
centuries, re-articulating the emotional narratives of martyrdom and remembering

past martyrs for the purposes of the present. For example the inscription on
Gordon’s monument, on the other side of the stone, instructs viewers that, ‘IF
A HARD FATE DEMANDS, OR CLAIMS A TEAR, STAY, GENTLE
PASSENGER, AND SHED IT HERE’ (Gibson 1881, pp. 84–85). This phrase
on Gordon’s monument addressing the ‘passenger’ echoes the earliest monument
erected to the martyrs by James Currie and Helen Alexander in Greyfriars
Churchyard in Edinburgh in 1706. It too addresses ‘a passenger’, sure in the
knowledge that members of this emotional community make pilgrimages to see
the place of their martyrs, and hear the stories of their martyrdom. Here we have
the emotional practices of a demonstrable community making memory tangible,
permanent and recoverable. Monuments, archives and printed culture intersect
and provide vital evidence of the Covenanters’ collective emotional actions in
early modern Scotland in their ongoing purpose of attaining a reformed and
Covenanted Scotland.
Airds Moss, 1680

As Sir Robert Hamilton, on 4 March 1702, put pen to paper under the sobriquet
of ‘Robert Smith’, he addressed his missive to ‘My dear Billie’ (The National
Records of Scotland 1702, Ch.3.269.26). Written under the guise of aliases, the
letter’s purpose was plain: what form should the memorial to the Covenanter
martyrs, who had died in 1680 at Airdsmoss, take? The Covenanters were intent
upon erecting a monument to the Minister Richard Cameron (c.1648–1680),
among others, who was killed in a skirmish at Airdsmoss. The Cameronian com-
munity felt the loss keenly, marking the spot with an unmarked stone, and
collectively committed these events and their martyrs to living memory. The
creation of the united societies, comprised local groups who, from the late 1680s,
onwards, kept session records of their activities demonstrating their collective
purpose and progress. For example, the ‘Conclusion of the Gen. Meeting of
CrafordJohn [Crawfordjohn in Scotland]’ taken down on 29 October 1701 ‘first
concluded that all the correspondances provide and make Ready stones as signs of
Honour to beset upon the graves of the late Martyrs as soon as possible’. What is
more, communities were also tasked with writing down the names of ‘martyers
with yr speaches and Testimany and by whom they were martyed or killed in
houses or fields contrey or cities as far as possible’, and that this information was
‘to be brought to the Nixt Ge. Meeting’.3 The ‘Epitephs, and Likewise’ were to
be ratified at these gatherings.4 Among these activities, in which the men and
women present ordered and maintained their godly society, was the gathering of
evidence for each martyr’s death, the place of their burial, and a desire to
commemorate them through the creation of funeral monuments with approved
inscriptions.
Hamilton’s letter describes the layout of the common monument style used
by those left alive to commemorate and venerate their martyrs. The Covenanter
symbols representing their open-air meetings comprised the sword of a Christian

soldier, a bible proclaiming the word of God, and a military banner of Covenanted
Scotland from Bothwell Bridge (1679). These were the symbols known to the
gatherings of women, men and children who worshipped, regardless of the risk to
their personal safety, as a trans-generational group, a covenanted group and an
emotional community. These funeral monuments are still to be found throughout
Scotland: many have been replaced and renewed in the following centuries. Most
of these monuments are in remote and inaccessible places.
In discussing the collective endeavour to erect stones in remembrance of their
martyrs, Hamilton told Billie that ‘the ston is curiously wrought on our Lords
servants at Airds Mose’. The ‘Epitaph’ comprised ‘a bible, upon one hand, arm
and shabbell [a short, crooked sword]’, adding ‘and ane other ston ready for laying
on there I hoop to ye satisfaction of friends. the gentillmen in st countries offering
to leed lym and stone for ye bricking a tomb wall about them if we will be of the
pains to build it’. Hamilton’s community were at pains that the monument was
built through this collective emotional community. The inscription proclaimed,
Here lyes the Corps of that famous and faithful/

preacher of the Gospell Mr Richard Cameron, who with severall others fell/
in an encounter with the bloody enemies/
of Truth and Godliness July 20 Anno 1680.
This Covenanter monument was typical in that it addressed those it assumed

were assembled before it, asking
Halt curious passanger, come heer

and read;
our souls Triumph with Christ our
glorious head
In self defence we murdered here
do ly,
To witness ‘gainst this Nations perjury
M
RC
Michael Cameron Robert Dick
John Hamilton Cap. John Fuller
John Gammell Robert Patteron
James Gray Thomas Wattson
While the inscription claimed that ‘Here lyes the Corps of that famous and
faithful’, James Gibson’s (1881, p. 185) account stated that ‘the head and hands of
Richard Cameron were cut off by Robert Murray, who delivered them to the
Council in Edinburgh’. The implementation of the treason laws saw the emotional
174 Dolly Mackinnon
impact of the dismembering of victims’ bodies. The severed hands simultaneously

represented those who had signed the National Covenant in allegiance to King
Jesus for some, as well as those deemed traitors to King and country.
The New Statistical Accounts of Scotland, Volume 5, Ayr – Bute (1845, p. 323),
makes reference to Cameron’s monument as located in ‘a cold and bleak district,
. . . Airds Moss occupies the centre of it for about four miles on its eastern
boundary, – which tends to give it an aspect of barrenness in that direction. . .’.
The account noted that ‘near the head of Airds Moss, is to be seem the monument
erected to the memory of Richard Cameron, who was here overtaken and slain
by the dragoons, on the 20th of July 1680’ (The New Statistical Accounts of Scotland,
Vol. 5: Ayr, Bute, 1845, p. 325). The sequence of monuments erected upon this
site is also accounted for, as ‘it consisted till lately of a flat stone with his own name
[Cameron], and the names of the other individuals who were slain along with him,
inscribed upon it’ (The New Statistical Accounts of Scotland, Vol. 5: Ayr, Bute, 1845,
pp. 325–326). This is the monument referred to by the Minutes of the United
Societies’ and Hamilton’s letter. Gibson’s volume claimed the ‘original gravestone
is placed upon four high pillars, with Cameron’s name on the head of it, the form
of an open Bible, with the other names round the side of the stone’ (Gibson 1881,
p. 186). The trans-generational processes of remembering saw a new monument
erected, for ‘a more conspicuous memorial of his life and death was reared some
years ago from the proceeds of a collection made at a sermon delivered near the
spot’ (The New Statistical Accounts of Scotland, Vol. 5: Ayr, Bute, 1845, p. 326). It
was ‘in the year 1832, [that] the gravestone was set up on a platform, three feet
high by ten feet square; in the centre an obelisk was erected, which may be seen
from the railway . . . [and] the date of its erection, 1832, is cut on one of the sides’
(Gibson 1881, pp. 186–187). The significance of this place in the Cameronian
emotional landscape is demonstrated by these perpetual memorial practices.
Wigtown martyrs
The Wigtown martyrs comprised two women, drowned on 11 May, and three
men hanged on 12 May 1685. The deaths of the two women martyrs have been
commemorated, contested, and by some, categorically denied and recast as part of
a fictitious Protestant martyrology (Napier 1863; Stewart 1869; Wodrow 1828–
1830; Thomson 1871; Adams 2014). The seventeenth- and early eighteenth-
century covenanter monuments commemorating these two women and three
men in Wigtown represent the ongoing Covenanting communities’ emotional
practices, memory and acts of remembering. These events were not disputed in
early modern Kirk session records for the surrounding area. The monuments
erected from the early eighteenth century onwards are found in three separate
locations: a series of funeral monuments to the three men and two women in the
Kirk-yard c.1711–1730; a monument at Windyhill in Wigtown to the women
and men erected in 1858; and a monument to the women only on the Bladnoch
tidal river flats erected in c.1937. The names of those recorded on the grave-
stones are those of Margaret Wilson, Margaret Lachlane (also spelt McLaughlin,
McLuachlison, Lauchlison et al.), William Johnston, John Milroy and George
Walker. ‘None of these were Wigtown Parish inhabitants, but were all commemo-
rated for having been executed there on May 11 & 12 1685’ (Wigtown’s Heritage
2004). Shield had depicted the women first in his Frontispiece to A Hind let Loose
in 1687, and then in a textual account of their deaths in 1690. The Wilson sisters
are commemorated outside of Wigtown, in a nineteenth-century monument in
Stirling, and there is also a monument to Margaret Wilson in a theological college
in Canada.
Protestant martyrology was intended to make a record of these past events for
the living, so the faithful could then garner strength from these examples to face
their own struggles ahead. This was also history in an antiquarian sense, as
documentary evidence was brought together with oral testimonies, and integrated
in order to write and document that past. For example, Robert Wodrow (1679–
1734) ‘had many close relationships’ with men and women ‘who had suffered’,
and this included members of ‘his own family’ and ‘in-laws’ who had gone into
hiding, been imprisoned and exiled during the Killing Times (Starkey 1974,
pp. 488–489). Wodrow said of the Wigtown martyrs that he had this event ‘fully
vouched by witnesses whose attestations are now in my hands’ (Starkey 1974,
p. 496). In 1711, the General Meeting of 6 October [at Crawfordjohn], asked
‘The several correspondences were appointed to take cop[i]es of the Epitaphs,
Engraven upon the martyrs gravestones in yr several bounds to be Brought to the
next meeting and that they be Inquisative qt Account can be had of any Remarkable
Instance of Gods judgement upon persecuters in the for said Bounds . . .’
(The National Records of Scotland 1711, Ch.3.269.1, p. 2).5 A Cloud of Witnesses
(1714, pp. 245–247) and Robert Wodrow’s The History of the Sufferings of the
Church of Scotland (1721–1722, 2 vols.) collected together for the first time the
accounts of the sufferings of the Church of Scotland.6 A Cloud of Witnesses (1714,
pp. 245–247) takes its title from Hebrews 12:1: ‘Wherefore, seeing we also are
compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight,
and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race
that is set before us’ (King James Bible, 1661), and has been used by writers to
discuss Protestant martyrs since the sixteenth-century Reformation in Europe.
Wodrow’s text, which included the two Margarets, was supported by an account
of the events furnished to him by Thomas Rowan, minister of Penninghame,
which was taken verbatim from the Penninghame Session Minute Book of 1711
(Starkey, p. 496). Alexander Shields’s A Hind Let Loose (1687) would also have
formed part of his evidence.
Only a minimal trail of evidence exists in official records about the Wigtown
martyrs. What is known is kept in the memory of those who had witnessed these
events and lived still. As Kuijpers and Pollmann (2013, p. 182) conclude, ‘public
silence was also a political imperative, with memories of revolt oftentimes an
unwanted remembrance of disloyalty’. From both the Covenanters’ and State’s
176 Dolly Mackinnon
points of view, ‘[t]he policy of the actors was to suppress the story, and to ignore
it in official records, and the wisdom of the friends of the sufferers was “to keep
silence, because it was an evil time”’ (Wylie 1875–1876, p. 870). Here, we have
simultaneous acts of remembering and forgetting.
By February 1685, Thomas Wilson (aged 16), Margaret Wilson (aged 18), and
Agnes Wilson (aged about 13) were being pursued by the authorities for not
taking the Oath of Abjuration (Gibson 1881, pp. 282–283). Thomas is said to have
kept to the hills around Wigtown, but Margaret and Agnes decided to head into
town to see friends. It was while they were visiting a house in Wigtown that they
were discovered, along with Margaret McLachland (aged 63) and Margaret Maxwell
(in middle age) (Campbell 1996, p. 183). The women were imprisoned in the
Wigtown Tollbooth, charged and found guilty of committing acts of rebellion,
including being present when the Covenanters had fought the King’s troops at
Bothwell Bridge (Battle 1679) and Airds Moss (Battle 1680). They were also
accused of attending 20 field conventicles and 20 house conventicles. Maxwell
took the Oath of Abjuration, the others did not (Campbell 1996, p. 183). To have
been present at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge, this would have made Margaret
Wilson aged 10, Agnes aged seven, and Margaret McLachland aged 57, and for
the Battle of Airdsmoss in 1680, Margaret Wilson was aged 11, Agnes aged eight,
and Margaret McLachland aged 58. While McLachland was old enough to be part
of the baggage train, and the young girls also, there is no archival evidence
indicating they had been present at either battle site.
The women were found guilty and condemned to death by drowning. A
petition for Margaret McLauchlison survives for 29 April 1685 requesting she be
allowed to take the Oath of Abjuration. An incomplete stay of execution and
pardon of 1685 also survives for Wilson and McLauchlison (Paton 1929, p. 33).
Historians in support of the martyrs have claimed the links to the battles are
unfounded, but certainly Margaret McLachlan, a widow, was old enough to have
been part of a baggage train for this army. Margaret Wilson’s younger sister Agnes
was also accused but her father pleaded a bond of £100 Scots for Agnes and she
was freed. Both Margarets were granted an undated pardon in Edinburgh, though
it is unknown if, and unlikely that, the incomplete pardon ever reached Wigtown
before 11 May.
In the case of the Wigtown martyrs, it was not until 1704 and then 1708 that
public expressions of this event could be made. These took two forms: a Kirk
pardon to one of the participants (1704) and the declaring of a Public fast in 1708.
Wigtown Kirk was now led by the Reverand Thomas Kerr, who was appointed
in 1701. Thus when in the Minutes of the Presbytery of Wigtown, Scotland on
8 July 1704, Bailie M’Keand, [the] elder, addressed Mr. Thomas Kerr (minister
from 1701–1729) and the Kirk ‘session for the privilege of the sacrament [which
has been denied him for 19 years]’’, he did so out of his sense of grief. Before the
assembled Session he was ‘declaring his grief of his heart that he should have sitten
in the seize of these women who were sentenced to die in this place in 1685’
(Presbytery of Wigtown 1711, cited in Stewart 1869, p. 95). He not only sought
redress from within his community, but also ‘it had also been frequently his
petition to God for true repentance and forgiveness for that sin’ (Stewart 1869,
p. 95). M’Keand then ‘being removed, the session’ discussed the matter further
and, without M’Keand present, set to ‘enquiring into this affair and the carriage
of the said bailie since that time, and being satisfied with his conversation since,
and the present evidence of repentance now, they granted him privilege’ (Stewart
1869, p. 95). What can also be inferred from this account is that the evidence
regarding the events in 1685 was also discussed, and the facts of the five deaths
were not disputed, implying that the events must have taken place. Those that sat
at the Kirk Sessions were well acquainted with the events nearly two decades
earlier, for the Session included those who had lived through them. Present were
members of families who had been fined for nonconformity. For example, Patrick
M’Kie, who was a member of the Kirk Session, was the son of Katherine Lauder,
the wife of Patrick M’Kie of Auchlean. Katherine herself had confessed to
withdrawing from the church for the two years between 1682–1684, and was
fined £250 [Scots] (Stewart 1869, p. 96). The quartering of troops with
nonconformist families, was a physical hardship and fiscal mechanism used by the
authorities to try to stem the tide of religious rebellion. When this failed, summary
execution proved to be the only option. In these emotional communities, these
events echoed across the following generations.
For example, in 1708 the Wigtown Kirk Sessions on 28 January declared a
Public Fast because ‘the sins of the late unhappy times have not been th[o]roughly
search[ed] out, laid to heart, and mourned over’ (Wigtown Kirk Session 1708,
cited in ‘The Wigtown Martyrs’ 1864, p. 142). By 1711, the Kirk Session minutes
for Penninghame dated 19 February recorded
A brief information of the sufferings of people which are most remarkable

in the paroch of Penninghame within the shire of Wigtoun upon the
account of their adherence to the Reformation of the Church of Scotland
and their refusing to conform with prelacie, with the occasions of their
trowbles especiallie from the year 1679 to the year 1689.
(The National Record of Scotland 1696–1729, Ch.2.1387.1
Minutes, Records of the Penninghame Kirk Sessions)
Yet the physical evidence of the funeral monuments to the two women and three
men in the Kirk-yard was interpreted by the nineteenth-century writer Napier as
an example of fraudulent action set up in order to vouch for the earlier printed
texts by Alexander Shields. Detractors saw these women in the historical record
as fictional martyrs; a trope first deployed against Shields (1687). Napier even
stated that their early eighteenth-century funeral monuments erected in the Kirk-
yard at Wigtown were fabricated. Yet, ‘[a]ccording to “The Cloud of Witnesses”,
Margaret Wilson’s memorial-stone was to be found in the churchyard prior to
1714’ and ‘that [monument] of Margaret McLachlan before 1730, when the third
edition of this work was published’ (Rogers 1871, p. 355). Wilson’s family had
178 Dolly Mackinnon
continued to live on the family farm and her brother Thomas, who escaped arrest
in 1685, returned to Wigtown and erected a monument to his sister in the early
eighteenth century. That monument was ‘originally placed against the north wall
of the church’, before it was then later grouped with the other martyr memorials
after 1730 (Rogers 1871, p. 355). The monuments are plain in their support for
the ongoing Reformation and a Covenanted Scotland, and apart from the individual
names they contain, and the stark words of ‘drowned’ and ‘murdered’, intent upon
an ‘Adherence to Scotland reformation covenants national and solemn league’ and
that they were ‘condemned’ and ‘suffered for Christ Jesus sake’, as stated in the
monument’s inscription.
Covenanter memories were also passed down to others who remembered them
and recounted them to younger generations. For example, in 1685 Margaret
Maxwell, who had been imprisoned with Wilson and Macklachan was, according
to her sentence, ‘paraded through the town . . . [to be scourged on three successive
days]’ (Walker 1827, cited in Wylie 1875–1876, p. 870). The recollections of one
man who had been a boy at the time were remembered and recounted by his
granddaughter Miss Heron: ‘the people retired into their houses, kept away from
their windows, and hardly a child was seen in the streets’ (Walker 1827, cited in
Wylie 1875–1876, p. 870). The reason being that ‘such was the Cruelty of these
Days, that all who retained any Thing of Humanity towards their Fellow-creatures,
abhorred such Barbarity; so that all the three Days the foresaid Margaret was
punished and exposed, there was scare one open Door or Window to be seen in
the Town of Wigtown, and no Boys or Girls looking on’ (Walker 1827, cited
in Wylie 1875–1876, p. 870). The veracity of the accounts was equated to Miss
Heron being ‘a lady of birth, who lived in Wigton [sic] when she herself was a girl,
used constantly to visit her father’s house’ (Walker 1827, cited in Wylie 1875–
1876, p. 870). That this was the testimony of a first-hand witness is demonstrated
by the claim ‘that her grandfather was an eye-witness of the execution of the two
women, and had himself spoken of it to her, mentioning that the people were
awestruck, and could not interfere’ (Walker, 1827, cited in Wylie 1875–1876,
p. 870). Those assembled then turned to King Jesus, and ‘formed themselves
into groups, uniting in prayer for the sufferers (Wylie 1875–1876, p. 870).
These emotional histories of the Covenanters would be reworked and recast
over the following centuries. As James Gibson’s evocative nineteenth-century
account of the emotional landscape of Covenanter memorials proclaimed, ‘the
moors and kirkyards were visited only for the purposes of planting stones of
remembrance’ (Gibson 1881, p. 24). They also utilised emotive language, such as
‘blood’, ‘martyrs’, ‘suffering’, ‘murder’, ‘drowned’, to create an emotional cov-
enanter community set on attaining a ‘Reformation’ of a ‘Covenanted Scotland’
for ‘Christ’ that spoke to those who visited these memorials. The collective
emotional practices of the Covenanters, over time, purposefully transformed the
lives of martyrs from the living testimonies of witness survivors into the tangible
permanent and then inscribed markers in the Scottish landscape, in an ongoing,
reciprocal cycle.
Notes
1 This research was funded by the Australian Research Council Centre for Excellence in
the History of Emotions, Europe 1100–1800 (CE110001011) through my Associate
Investigator Grant (2011–2014), ‘Emotional Landscapes: English and Scottish Battlefield
memorials 1638–1936’ and my collaborative Australian Research Council Discovery
Grant DP:140101177: Battlefields of memory: places of war and remembrance in
medieval; and early modern England and Scotland. (2014–2016) The research was
written up as part of my Visiting Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the
Humanities at The University of Edinburgh in early 2016.
2 T. Duncan, The Death of John Brown of Priesthill (1844), Glasgow Museums, Scotland.
3 Ewart Library, Dumfries, Scotland: GGD255 Minutes of the Proceedings and
Conclusions of the General Meeting of the Witnessing Remnant of Presbyterians in
Scotland.
4 Ewart Library: GGD255.
5 Conclusion of the General Meetings held at Crafordjohn 6th October 1711.
6 Shields (A Hind Let Loose 1687, p. 200) states ‘In the beginning of this killing-time, as
the Country calls it, the first author and authorizer of all these mischiefs, Charles II, was
removed by death’.
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Taylor & Francis
11
PARADOXES OF FORM AND
CHAOS IN THE POETRY OF
WATERLOO
Robert White
Before battle, form rules the ranks. Armies are in straight lines, men move
symmetrically and in ‘formation’, clothed in ‘uniforms’, which, as such words
suggest, are all the same and seek to erase personal differences, each side differen-
tiated, like sporting teams, only by colours. There seems something harmlessly
aesthetic about such sights, whether satirised through the ‘hobby-horse’ of Uncle
Toby Shandy, the military veteran of the Seven Years’ War who continually
replays this world war (1756–1763) in his garden fortifications, or simulated by
modern soldiers trained in computerised war-games or sending armed mechanical
drones hundreds of miles away. By contrast, when violent combat is engaged,
form and order are rapidly lost and the orderly scene degenerates into chaos. The
pattern played itself out at Waterloo. There is nothing so levelling and reduced to
formlessness as the results of bayonets to stomachs, bullets to heads, horses staggering
and dying, or body parts blown to the winds by cannon shot, while even visibility
is lost in engulfing smoke. After battle, violated and fragmented bodies are the
remaining marks of individuation that military forms had sought to occlude. In
representing war, then, writers face an extreme quandary in tensions between the
subject matter and the act of writing; as Kate McLoughlin puts it in Authoring War:
The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (2011, pp. 6–7), ‘War . . .
resists depiction . . . . Yet even as it resists representation, conflict demands it’.
This chapter will explore some aspects of the quandary in terms of how English
writers responded in print to the Battle of Waterloo.
The story of Waterloo was told many times soon after the event, from many
points of view. Seamus Perry writes of ‘the conjuring of Waterloo into a metaphor’,
wondering at how ‘the mere facts were conjured so swiftly into myth’ (Perry
2016, p. 58), but that myth was capable of bearing many interpretations. The
Battle of Waterloo in 1815, like that of Agincourt exactly 400 years earlier, was
an occasion conveniently transformed into legendary status through poetry,
184 R. S. White
a medium that sometimes glorifies heroism while at other times lamenting suffering,
and occasionally both. Philip Shaw in Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (2002)
argues that the event decisively redefined the whole period of English Romantic
literature, as well as underpinning new conceptions of English nationalism. Some
poets, including Scott, Byron and Southey, visited the site of the field of Waterloo
in the months and years following the Battle. The background to the later narrative
shape given to the battle, is that Belgium, a hapless state which has often been
sandwiched between warring opponents, to the extent that it has gained the name
of ‘Battlefield of Europe’, had been virtually chosen as the theatre of war, mainly
because Napoleon for political reasons could not risk defeat on French soil,
while Britain and Prussia regarded the Belgian community as a relatively reliable,
and perhaps dispensable ally (Muir 2015, p. 37). ‘Theatre of war’ is a term advisedly
chosen here. Historical circumstances provided a ready-made dramatic form to the
sequence of events at Waterloo, structured as a stage play, drawing on the dimen-
sion of ‘theatre’ as a terminology of war: ‘Act One’ takes place on the evening
before the day of the battle, as a glittering ball at Brussels. ‘Act Two’ includes the
scene before battle and the conflict itself, with its vignettes of violence and hero-
ism. ‘Act Three’ is the aftermath of appalling sights and sounds of suffering and
agonising deaths of men and horses, on a battlefield where medical attention was
not comprehensive, professional or systematic – to those who saw it, a scene from
hell. This chapter explores how the tripartite sequence was shaped into poetic
form, depending on each poet’s relative perspective and attitude to war. Each
example raises in different ways a paradox or contradiction faced by its writer, how
to present war in the shapely formality of poetry, while also charting the steady
descent of military conflict itself, from orderly formations and established etiquette,
into the inchoate chaos of human destruction and desecration of nature. Whether
the individual poet’s ordering principle is patriotic celebration, religious affirmation
of God’s design, or anti-war sentiment, all the poets face the paradox of conveying
the formlessness of violence through the structured form of poetry, and their main
vehicle lies in controlling emotional expressiveness through the deployment of
words in rhythm.
In one early prose account, the ‘mere facts’ of a basic narrative of the battle, as
seen by the English, are summarised in ‘Circumstantial Detail’ by a ‘near observer’,
‘An Englishwoman’ identified as Jane Waldie Watts.1 Her visit was something of
a family affair:
On Saturday, the 10th of June, 1815, my brother, my sister, and myself

sailed from the pier of Ramsgate at three in the afternoon, in company
with Sir—, Major—, extra Aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington,
a Mr.—, an English merchant; together with an incongruous assemblage
of horses, dogs, and barouches; Irish servants, French valets, and steerage
passengers, too multifarious to mention, all crowded into a wretched little
packet.
(Watts 1817, pp. 1–2)
The poetry of Waterloo 185
Troops were ordered for readiness on the 15th, with reports coming in that the
allied Belgians under their commander Blücher had briefly joined combat, but,
reinforcing the tone of a social occasion, the English entourage prepared themselves
for a ball in the evening:
Yes, a ball! For the Duke of Wellington, and his aides-de-camp, and half of
the British officers, though they expected to go to a battle to-morrow, were
going to a ball to-night, at the Duchess of Richmond’s; and to the ball they
did accordingly go.
(Watts 1817, p. 32)
To capture the tone, Watts quotes the poetry of ‘the Scottish Chief ’ in
John Home’s Douglas: a Tragedy (1756), in which the call to ‘Prepare the feast!’
holds a terrible contradiction between the night’s revelry and the morrow’s
slaughter:
This night once more

Within these walls we rest: our tents we pitch
To-morrow in the field. Prepare the feast! –
Free is his heart who for his country fights:
He on the eve of battle may resign
Himself to social pleasure: sweetest then,
When danger to a Soldier’s soul endears
The human joy that never may return.
(Watts 1817, p. 32)
The Duke of Wellington received news at the ball that Napoleon was advancing.
Distant explosions were heard from the village of Quatre Bras, at first dismissed
as thunder but gradually recognised as cannon fire. Realising that the English
should march immediately to support the Belgians, Wellington acted with sang-
froid so as not to break the decorum of the occasion, and was apparently aware of
his coming status as man of historical destiny:
We were afterwards told, that upon perusing them he seemed for a few
minutes to be absolutely absorbed in a profound reverie, and completely
abstracted from every surrounding object; and that he was even heard to
utter indistinctly a few words to himself. After a pause he folded up the
dispatches, called one of his staff officers to him, gave the necessary orders
with the utmost coolness and promptitude; and, having directed the army
to be put in motion immediately, he himself staid at the ball till past two in
the morning.
(Watts 1817, p. 41)
186 R. S. White
Next morning the Highland regiments marched off,
with their bagpipes playing before them, while the bright beams of the rising
sun shone full on their polished muskets, and on the dark waving plumes of
their tartan bonnets. We admired their fine athletic forms, their firm erect
military demeanour and undaunted mien.
(Watts 1817, p. 41)
Others followed in the same orderly fashion:
Regiment after regiment formed and marched out of Brussels; we heard the
last word of command – March! the heavy measured uniform tread of the
soldiers’ feet upon the pavement, and the last expiring note of the bugles,
as they sounded from afar.
(Watts 1817, p. 46)
The phrase ‘the heavy measured uniform tread’ works overtime in mirroring both
the rhythm of marching and the rhythm of the prose itself reaching towards poetic
intensity.
As the day wore on, information and misinformation, rumours and reports
ebbing between alarming and triumphant, flowed back to the civilians: ‘This
dreadful uncertainty and ignorance made us truly wretched’ (Watts 1817, p. 59).
Even in the town the scenes became ones of ‘tumult and confusion’ (Watts 1817,
p. 101), expressed through a suggestive image of ‘the turbulence of the unruly
cattle’, which stampeded. The writer spares an empathetic thought for foes as well
as friends, as the suffering on the battlefield gradually becomes known in Act Two
of the unfolding drama:
Not even imagination could form an idea of the dreadful sufferings that the
unfortunate soldiers of the French and Prussian armies, who were wounded
in the battles of the 15th and 16th June, were condemned to endure. It was
not until nearly a week afterwards that surgical aid, or assistance of any kind,
was given to them. During all this time they remained exposed to the
burning heat of the noon-day sun, the heavy rains, and the chilling dews of
midnight, without any sustenance except what their importunity extorted
from the country people, and without any protection even from the flies
that tormented them. Numbers had expired; the most trifling wounds had
festered, and amputation in almost every instance had become necessary.
This, and every other necessary operation, was most unskilfully and negli-
gently performed by the Prussian surgeons. The description I heard of this
scene of horror, from some respectable Belgic gentlemen who were spectators
of it on the Wednesday following, is too dreadful to repeat.
(Watts 1817, pp. 103–104, fn)
It was a hot day for all,
but if we felt the rays of the sun beneath which we journeyed to be so

oppressive, what must be the situation of the poor unsheltered wounded,
exposed to its fervid blaze in the open field, without even a drop of water
to cool their thirst? What must be the sufferings of our own unfortunate
men, above all, of those who were not only wounded but prisoners, and at
the mercy of the merciless French?
(Watts 1817, p. 104)
Feelings of grief and horror sink in as the writer thinks of the ‘gallant soldiers,
whom in the morning we had seen march out so proudly to battle, and who were
now lying insensible in death on the plains of Quatre Bras’ (Watts 1817, p. 65).
Watts identifies the imagination as the worst form of knowledge, at first insufficient
in the face of suffering but then the only tool left for understanding. This provides
the basis for Act Three:
Never – never till this moment had I any conception of the horrors of war!
and they have left an impression on my mind which no time can efface.
Dreadful indeed is the sight of pain and misery we have no power to relieve,
but far more dreadful are the horrors imagination pictures of the scene of
carnage; the agonies of the wounded and the dying on the field of battle,
where even the dead who had fallen by the sword, in the prime of youth
and health, are to be envied! – the thought was agony, and yet I could not
banish it from my mind.
(Watts 1817, p. 105)
The English allies won victory on 18 June. It has been estimated that among all
combatants 71,000 were killed or wounded in the battle itself, to which
consequential casualties should be added making a total of 120,300 (Roberts 2005,
p. 120). Every one of them, whether English, French or Belgian, was an individual
imbued with the sanctity of human life, and each left grieving and bereft families
and communities. For days afterwards the cries and groans of the wounded
continued to pierce the air, and pillaging was rife. It was a triumphant win for the
victors, but for those who witnessed or suffered the consequences, it was also the
traumatic loss of innocence expressed by Jane Watts, shattering any prior illusions
about the glory of war.
The historical importance of the event and its outcome included, it has been
variously argued, the final death knell not only of French military might and
Napoleon’s imperialistic aspirations, but of the French Revolution itself, since the
Bourbons of the ancien régime were soon to be reinstated. The Battle of Waterloo
produced a consolidation of the British Empire, and the inception of the American
Empire as French control of its own colonies weakened. Jeffrey N. Cox (2014)
188 R. S. White
has argued that the younger Romantics responded to the Napoleonic Wars and
their aftermath as to a time of ‘global war’, and the long-term consequences seem
to justify such a description. Even the hope that the economic hardship of the war
years in Britain might be lifted in peacetime came to naught, since depression and
mass unemployment immediately followed. A third conclusion, then, might be
that Waterloo achieved nothing but further destruction, into the distant and
apparently unending future. Wars are not only visible signs of destruction in the
past but also portend ruins to come. One transient benefit could not be justified
by the mass suffering and negative outcomes, but undoubtedly, as Bennett writes,
the conflict had a galvanising effect on its British critics:
The end of the war signified the beginning of an unflagging struggle by the
working and middle classes for liberty and justice, a struggle which was to
continue throughout the nineteenth century.
(Bennett 1976, p. 91)
A range of poetic responses among British writers followed Waterloo. Many

undistinguished poems were written on the occasion of the Battle, and some can
be found by scouring through the indispensable anthology of British War Poetry in
the Age of Romanticism edited by Betty Bennett (1976), now selectively online.
Both Simon Bainbridge (1995) and Jeffrey N. Cox (2014, p. 166) ‘place the
number of poems – which presumably would include newspaper verse – in the
hundreds’. There were, of course, many who celebrated the victory at Waterloo
in patriotic ways that helped consolidate its mythic, nationalistic status.
Representative of these were poems by the writer signing himself Wm Thos
Fitzgerald whose poetic voice was unleashed on any public occasion, to the
irritation of Byron (1810, ll. 1–2): ‘Shall hoarse Fitzgerald bawl / His creaking
couplets in a tavern hall . . .?’, the latter protested. After Waterloo, Fitzgerald
claimed the mantle of a bard, crowing loudly on behalf of the victors over the
defeated Napoleon as ‘vile oppressor of mankind’:
Such Bard, in strength and loftiness of lays,

May soar beyond hyperbole of praise,
And yet not give the tribute that is due
To BRITONS, WELLINGTON, led on by you!!
For to the plains of WATERLOO belong
The magic numbers of immortal song!
(Bennett 1976, p. 7)
Fitzgerald was one among many stirred by victory into writing celebratory poetry,
and even though other like-minded poets offered generous acknowledge-
ment to the allied nations who helped, they regarded it as first and foremost a
military triumph of British heroism. They held on to this ideological position as
guiding the form of their writing.
Other poets assuming a bardic posture offered more subtle and mixed cele-
bration of the victory at Waterloo. Wordsworth and Southey had joined public
celebrations for the defeat of Napoleon on top of Mount Skiddaw in the Lake
District (Bainbridge 1995, p. 153). Wordsworth’s poem, known as ‘Thanksgiving
Ode’, while mourning the dead, included the lines ridiculed by Byron and Shelley
and damned by a horrified Hazlitt, lines seeing man as God’s instrument: ‘Man –
arrayed for mutual slaughter, – Yea, carnage is thy [God’s] daughter!’ (Wordsworth
1989, p. 188), confirming that the slaughter was part of God’s plan. This sentiment
is expressed in the context of a poem which is, throughout, primarily religious in
intention, rather than expressing simply a conventional, secular patriotism. For
Wordsworth, there is a pattern and a form even in the chaos, though it is visible
only to an omniscient God, and perhaps an equally omniscient poet. When he
twice republished the poem almost 30 years later, Wordsworth dropped the lines,
perhaps made aware by reviewers of their potential offence.
Wordsworth also wrote two sonnets in February 1816. ‘Occasioned by the
Battle of Waterloo’ is centrally focused not on what has happened, but on
the power of ‘The Bard, whose soul is meek as dawning day’ to see through ‘the
array / Of past events’ with an ‘experienced eye’ and ‘vision clear’.
He only, if such breathe, in strains devout

Shall comprehend this victory sublime;
Shall worthily rehearse the hideous rout,
The triumph hail, which from their peaceful clime
Angels might welcome with a choral shout!
In some way it is a strange way to view ‘the hideous rout’ as somehow self-
aggrandising the poet’s visionary and prophetic powers, but Wordsworth asserts it,
again as an example of willed form subjugating emotional complexities of substance.
The other sonnet, ‘Occasioned by the Battle of Waterloo’, is more straightforwardly
patriotic, praising the ‘Intrepid sons of Albion!’ as ‘Heroes!’ for their courage in
quelling ‘that impious crew : ‘But death, becoming death, is dearer far, / When
duty bids you bleed in open war’. Horace’s epigram (Odes 2.3.13) comes to mind:
‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’. Decorum (‘becoming’) is rich with implicature,
suggesting both literary and ethical appropriateness of form; it raises profound
questions about the extent to which human suffering is justified to achieve this
decorum. The implicit paradox renders vulnerable Horace’s sententia to the kind
of dark parody and sarcasm in Wilfred Owen’s famous poem of the same name,
when transplaced to the actual scene of battle. In the case of Wordsworth’s sonnet
the somehow complacent rhyme between ‘hideous rout’ and ‘choral shout’ provides
its own unintended irony.
But the sight of the place itself may have taken its subtle revenge on
Wordsworth. He and his sister Dorothy made a visit some years afterwards in
1820, and the result was another sonnet, ‘After Visiting the Field of Waterloo’,
which conveys a wider spectrum of feelings about the experience. It is more
190 R. S. White
disconcerting, as though the sense of place is too sobering to sustain the sense of
triumph. Initially ‘A winged Goddess, clothed in vesture wrought / Of rainbow
colours’ hovers over the ‘far-famed Spot’ as though investing it with a benign,
holy aura. This, however, vanishes:
. . . leaving prospect blank and cold

Of wind-swept corn that wide around us rolled
In dreary billows, wood, and meagre cot . . .
At this moment, ‘glory seemed betrayal’ and ‘patriot zeal / Sank in our hearts’, to
be replaced by a haunting sense of treading upon the dead:
. . . we felt as Men should feel

With such vast hoards of hidden carnage near,
And horror breathing from the silent ground.
Given his generally celebratory tone, it may not be likely that Wordsworth quite
knew or intended that he had written in an anti-war vein, but the shift in tone is
so marked that it seems the progression and immediacy of thought has broken out
of the sonnet form designed to immortalise Waterloo, as though a bubble of
thought has been punctured and momentarily allowed entrance to something
darker and chaotic.
Inevitably there were poems written from a range of different viewpoints about
Waterloo. Some poets such as Shelley and Byron saw Wellington’s victory not as
Britain’s but more narrowly as that of the English Tory party, intent primarily on
‘regime change’ in France after the Revolution. Occasionally a poet willing to risk
the charge of Jacobinism, such as one writing under the name of ‘P. Cornwall’ in
the Whig-leaning The Morning Chronicle (21 October 1815), offered condolences
to the fallen hero Napoleon, now bereft of fair-weather friends and supporters
(Bennett 1976, p. 10). Hazlitt, biographer of Napoleon, openly grieved, and Byron
confessed himself ‘d—d sorry’ (Cathcart 2015). Some were intentionally anti-war.
‘W. A.’ expressed at least ambivalence over Waterloo, and although showing relief
at the allied victory, also lamented that once again the ‘embattled plain / . . . Lies
heaped with myriads of its victims slain’. In this poem ‘the fiend’ is not a military
enemy but war itself in its indiscriminate destruction of the innocent:
But pause! and contemplate this scene of blood,

This endless widowhood,
To many a thousand sorrows, joys, and fears:
The mother’s sighs,
The Orphan’s cries,
The parent’s grief,
In agonising strains assail our ears –
(Bennett 1976, p. 11)
Among anti-war literary responses, Leigh Hunt appended to his allegorical ballad
Captain Sword and Captain Pen a summary of Robert Southey’s searing eyewitness
prose account of an earlier battlefield at Blenheim, ‘The Horrors of War’, with its
descriptions of the wounded and dying presented with polemical impact. Hunt’s
poem plays out its metaphorical theme that the pen is mightier than the sword,
and, as I have argued elsewhere, in his Appendix Hunt was envisioning and
contributing to the function of the Red Cross, though its inception lay over 50
years into the future (White 2015).
By contrast with subsequent wars fought either in trenches away from
communities or later by strategies of purposeful and genocidal mass aerial bombing
of civilian areas, the Battle of Waterloo was waged right in the middle of a farming
community. The action was closely observed at the time by nearby cottage
dwellers, and bullet holes in their homes bore witness to the proximity. Their
farms were destroyed and their animals were among the victims. The conflict was
heard by nearby citizens, including anxious families of officers staying in towns
nearby.
The battlefield of Waterloo, later regarded as a kind of shrine, was visited after
the event by writers. Sir Walter Scott was there by August, as one of the first
civilians to arrive, and he was followed soon by Southey and a year later Byron
and Wordsworth.2 The artist J. M. W. Turner went in 1817, and his darkly
brooding painting ‘The Field of Waterloo’, exhibited in 1818, has the profound
atmosphere of a mourning vigil by mankind and nature, as grieving relatives from
both sides search by night the mountain of corpses for loved ones. This raises, in
the context of pictorial art, the kind of paradox of form and formlessness we are
observing in poetry, as control of aesthetic form is deployed to depict chaos, and
emotions drive the process. In art, we are encouraged to conceive of form as
organic and natural even though it can be imposed and even unnaturally regular.
The aim of the artist in representing war is to create a form and principle of order,
which can unobtrusively guide the eye and the feelings to see as the artist does,
even when what we see is a version of chaos. Turner’s painting, in Romantic-era
terms is not picturesque but sublime, and as powerful a statement on the inchoate
horrors of war as Picasso’s Guernica and Goya’s series on The Disasters of War. Such
works are paralleled at Waterloo more conventionally by the works of famous war
artists of the time, Matthew Dubourg and Heaviside (‘Waterloo’) Clark.
In form, interestingly, two modes of poetry commonly adopted in the poems
of Waterloo are among the most rhythmically regular, the ballad and Spenserian
stanzas. These are genres designed to create a feeling of ‘long ago’ times that
belong as much to legend and allegory as historical fact. Both forms were revived
during the later eighteenth century into the Romantic period, after publication
of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765. Wordsworth in the year of
Waterloo, 1815, proclaimed Percy’s work as central to his own age’s poetic
enterprise: ‘I do not think there is an able Writer of verse of the present day who
would not be proud to acknowledge his obligations to the Reliques; I know that
it is so with my friends; and for myself, I am happy in this occasion to make
192 R. S. White
a public avowal of my own’ (Wordsworth 1815). (His own works on Waterloo,

however, comprised an ode and sonnets.) Ballads and Spenserian stanzas are used
in poems about Waterloo for stylistic reasons: the pace and straightforward rhythms
and rhymes of the ballad emphasise narrative, and lend an anonymous poetic
stance; while the Spenserian form was linked with nationalistic pride, and –
through its conscious archaisms – evoked an ‘olde worlde’. Associations with the
allegorical apparatus of The Faerie Queene also added a heightened sense of historical
significance to the perspective.
In ‘The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo’, written on visiting the battlefield in
October, Southey in some ways fuses the two forms to suit his purposes. This
poem uses a story mode of the pilgrimage as journey followed by battle, and then
the allegory of the second Part, titled ‘The Vision’, to celebrate British bravery in
fulsome terms while demonising Napoleonic tyranny. The long work also
ambitiously aspires to epic proportions, structured in two main sections each
divided into four Parts of about 50 stanzas each. As poet laureate from 1813 to
1843 (which he declares in his subtitle) he could hardly have done otherwise.
Southey reminds us of this public responsibility, consciously and fairly consistently
adopting the self-aggrandising stance suitable to the writer of a bardic lay, beginning
with a strong assertion of ego:
Me most of all men it behoved to raise

The strain of triumph for this foe subdued,
To give a voice to joy, and in my lays
Exalt a nation’s hymn of gratitude,
And blazon forth in song that day’s renown,
For I was graced with England’s laurel crown.
(Southey 1838, p. 14)
He speaks of emulating accounts of ‘tilts in days of old, And tourneys’ graced by

chieftains of renown, / Fair dames, grave citizens, and warriors bold . . .’, again
distancing his own story from the present in a framework including balladry and
Spenserian historical perspective. The primary aim is to celebrate the allied victory,
but in Southey’s poem there are more disquieting notes that break through in spite
of the poet’s political beliefs. Briefly, Southey had once been a radical, but to the
exasperation of younger Romantics such as Hazlitt, he became more and more
conservative – hence his laureateship. But pockets of radicalism remained latent
in his mind, especially in his condemnation of war. We know from his journal
mentioned above, published as The Horrors of War, that his ‘pilgrimage’ had
traumatised him with the manifest evidence of suffering. This strain, however
powerful, enters his poem in an almost smuggled way to qualify the more
ostentatious nationalism and distancing devices. He speaks from observation of
the hospital where, even after three months, men were dying in ‘wretchedness
and pain’:
Her inmost chambers trembled with dismay;

And now within her walls, insatiate Death,
Devourer whom no harvest e’er can fill,
The gleanings of that field was gathering still.
(Southey 1838, p. 26)
The imagery ironically reprises the likening of war to a grotesque feast, in this case
harvest. Memories must have been triggered of images he had seen before, of
casualties of war as limbless invalids being carried exhausted and helpless on
wagons, only just able to draw the breath which was the only outward sign of the
fact they were alive, prelude to ‘pain through hopeless years of lingering death’.
There ‘comes with horror to the shuddering mind’ the groans and cries breathed
in mortal pain by ally and enemy alike on the battlefield, and fleetingly and
unexpectedly, as though from his unconscious, Southey touches the nerve and
brings a moment of undeniable outrage to his mind by envisaging the distortions
of form caused by violent conflict:
Here might the hideous face of war be seen,

Stript of all pomp, adornment, and disguise;
It was a dismal spectacle I ween,
Such as might well to the beholders’ eyes
Bring sudden tears, and make the pious mind
Grieve for the crimes and follies of mankind.
(Southey 1838, p. 27)
If the poem had proceeded along this sombre line, it would hardly have endeared
itself as much as it did to the Tory press such as the Anti-Jacobin. Instead, however,
the intrusively indecorous note passes immediately from outrage to regret, and
then into a diatribe of blame against France as ‘the guilty nation’, which had fallen
under ‘a Tyrant’s yoke’ and had brought on the conflict. Southey later returns to
the note of inner resistance in a gentler key when he imagines the local villagers
who lived nearby, their fields of green corn trampled and blood-soaked ‘like water
shed’, ‘ancient groves and fruitful orchards wide’ destroyed, small holdings littered
with dead and dying men and horses, cottage walls peppered with musket holes
and flecked with streaks of blood, wives and children fled ‘to some near retreat’
to tremble in fear for their husbands left behind as helpless and hapless observers.
There is even a hint of less than patriotic regret from Southey, ‘Alas to think such
irreligious deed / Of wrong from British soldiers should proceed!’. Throughout
‘The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo’ we observe at work the paradox in a new
key. An uncomfortable part of Southey’s affective memory keeps obtruding to
disturb and disrupt the overlaid order and form which his ideology of patriotism
seeks to impose. The result is both psychologically and artistically a more complex
and emotionally honest poem than Southey may have been fully aware of.
194 R. S. White
Sir Walter Scott’s ‘The Field of Waterloo’ was widely panned by conservative
critics at the time because of its perceived lukewarm partisanship for the English
cause. John Gibson Lockhart, an editor reviled by literary historians as one who
destroyed Keats’s budding reputation, was scathing. Lockhart used criticism of
style as a stalking horse to mask his political antipathy, based on his perception that
Scott had been far more impressive when writing about his own nation’s Battle
of Bannockburn, the first war of Scottish independence in 1314, than he was of
a victory claimed generally as led by the English because of Wellington’s generalship
(Lockhart 1914, p. 120). Although the poem is neither ballad nor, until its end,
Spenserian in form, but mainly in the metre of Scott’s Marmion, the perspective is
comparable to these genres. Generally speaking, Scott is, like other patriotic poets,
seeking to mythologise Waterloo in Spenserian terms as a late ‘flower of Chivalry’
opposed to ‘a dragon foe’, and his comparisons are with Agincourt and Cressy,
though such heroics, despite ending the poem, are not consistent with the overall
impression it makes. However, his effort was considered lukewarm and hackneyed
by the critics, and it was even parodied by rival poets. The overt thrust is to
describe the conflict, to praise Wellington and denigrate Napoleon, and also to
evoke a sense of place. However, amidst generalities Scott allows a more critical
pattern of thought to assert itself. The poet gives visualised glimpses of the post-
battle scene where a stronger, more melancholy and dismayed tone emerges:
And ere the darkening of the day,

Piled high as autumn shocks, there lay
The ghastly harvest of the fray,
The corpses of the slain.
(Scott 1910, pp. 609–628, stanzas 5, 6)
Even two months after the fray, bodies are vestigially visible from evidence of
a ‘trenched mound’ while ‘pestilential fumes’ still hang in the air, either meta-
phorically or literally. The reader is then led into the specific landscape of the
poem gradually, allowing us slowly to realise how the initial impression of the
battle scene differs from the human triumphalism of the victory. The emphasis
develops into stanza 20 where ‘Triumph and Sorrow border near’, bringing us
closer to the living victims, and in stanza 23 environmental destruction is emphasised
as the price paid for human glory. In a more subtle way perhaps than other poets,
Scott develops the full significance of visiting the battlefield after the event, when
the place is visibly different and reveals as much human degradation of nature as
of humankind. Scott’s intention was to send profits from the poem’s publication
to a fund for soldiers’ widows and orphans, the Waterloo Subscription. Despite
critical denigration, it was in fact successful with the public, 6,000 copies selling
out initially, sending it into a second and third edition, so it succeeded in its aim
of aiding victims.
Lord Byron’s attitude to war was somewhat equivocal depending on the
political motives behind a particular conflict (White 2008, pp. 188–190). He was
opposed to war as such, especially when it was for imperialistic reasons or to

acquire territory, but he supported wars of independence waged by oppressed
populations, such as the one in Greece which he funded himself and during which
he died. Needless to say, he was scathing about Waterloo, which he saw as an
unnecessary war fought for purely nationalistic and aggressive reasons on both
sides – by the imperialist Napoleon and by the conservative British government
opposed to the French Revolution. Canto III, stanza XVIII of Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage stands alone as one of the great anti-war poems, and it is built upon the
self-sufficient episode which, when anthologised, goes under the name ‘The Eve
of Waterloo’. Byron makes specific reference to the ball at Brussels on the evening
before battle, like Scott who was himself reproved by the critics for its inclusion.
This event was regarded ambivalently in Britain, as either a gesture of heroic
audacity or of extravagance, complacency and arrogance. Byron, clearly in the
latter camp, uses the ‘night before’ to contrast with and intensify the unnecessary
suffering during the two days to come, as Leigh Hunt was to do later in his overtly
pacifist ballad Captain Sword and Captain Pen. Byron wrote ‘The Eve of Waterloo’
in exact Spenserian stanzas, consistent with the whole of Childe Harold.
Characteristically, he varies and adapts the form opportunistically to suit his
intentions, sometimes parodying or even burlesquing it, sometimes to attack anti-
quarian attitudes to nationalism and religion, and sometimes to accentuate an
allegorical tendency. Here he uses it as a framework to universalise the event,
which happened in ‘this place of skulls’, not in Southey’s and Scott’s spirit of moral
and military triumph, but rather to exemplify the futility of war itself. Spenser, no
pacifist himself in his public role as apologist for English genocide in Ireland in his
View of the Present State of Ireland, may not have approved of Byron’s message, but
the poetic deployment of his stanzaic form is true to his own mission of making
myths out of poetry.
Brussels rings to the ‘sound of revelry by night’ and the ball is described with
the vocabulary of ‘Chivalry’ laced with Byron’s seductive trademark of a language
of love soon to be brutally halted in its lulling romanticism:
A thousand hearts beat happily; and when

Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spake again . . .
(Byron 1980, pp. 832–837)
As the poem’s perspective widens, nature itself becomes a horrified, lamenting

spectator:
And Ardennes waves above them her green leaves,

Dewy with nature’s tear-drops, as they pass,
Grieving, if aught inanimate e’er grieves,
Over the unreturning brave, – alas!
196 R. S. White
Ere evening to be trodden like the grass

Which now beneath them, but above shall grow
In its next verdure, when this fiery mass
Of living valour, rolling on the foe
And burning with high hope, shall moulder cold and low.
(Byron 1980, pp. 832–837)
Like Turner, Byron sees nature as implicated in the condemnation of man, ‘if
aught inanimate e’er grieves’, and the grass trodden down by men will grow over
them when they are dead. At the end of the fragment, the poem returns to its
opening, with a poignant reminder of the ‘lusty life’ of youthfulness ‘in Beauty’s
circle proudly gay’, in order to throw into relief the hideous and formless chaos
after the battle, lamented even by nature and the reproving weather:
The thunder-clouds close o’er it, which when rent

The earth is covered thick with other clay
Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent,
Rider and horse, – friend, foe, – in one red burial blent!
(Byron 1980, pp. 832–837)
What had been a scene of human ‘revelry’ has, through war, been turned into a
site of indiscriminate slaughter of animals, allies and enemies alike, an exercise of
‘mutual slaughter’ deliberately undermining attitudes such as those in Wordsworth’s
pious complacent theocracy. ‘Thick with other clay’ is a disturbing image. The
sheer pointlessness of war in general as chaos overthrows form, love and human
aspirations, is Byron’s target in this brief but powerful poetic episode.
One more work, this time in prose and written long after the event, provides
our coda. Thackeray’s historical novel Vanity Fair may draw on Byron’s poem, and
if so it carries an extra, allusive richness. Published in 1848 but set during the
Napoleonic Wars, a decisive turning point in the narrative is the Battle of Waterloo
(Thackeray 1968).3 The male characters are regimental officers who, with their
wives and children on the night before battle, attend the ball organised in Brussels
for ‘such a brilliant train of camp-followers as hung around the Duke of
Wellington’s army’. In the hint behind the words ‘hung around’, we already see
something of the writer’s distancing and derogatory attitude, not to speak of the
buried metaphor of camp followers as a string of ‘brilliant’ baubles strung around
their leader. The narrator comments acidly, ‘I have heard from ladies who were
in that town at the period, that the talk and interest of persons of their own sex
regarding the ball was much greater than in respect of the enemy in their front’
(Thackeray Vanity Fair, ch. xxix). New dresses and ornaments are flaunted, fine
wines drunk, and but for sardonic asides of poetic irony, such as the parenthetic
reference to the Captain’s ‘wife (or it might be his widow’s) guardianship’, and
the solitary anxieties of the stolid and faithful Dobbin for his beloved Amelia in
the event of defeat, nobody gives a realistic thought to the impending dangers.
Realistic in her own mercenary way is Becky Sharp who coldly calculates how
much she will inherit should her husband Rawdon Crawley be killed. As news
arrives that battle will be engaged, reactions oscillate between George Osborne’s
mounting excitement and his wife Amelia’s fear. As dawn bugles awaken the
soldiers to combat, the novel’s gaze remains behind with the women, children and
Jos Sedley who all stay at the hotel, along with the narrator: ‘We do not claim to
rank among the military novelists. Our place is with the non-combatants’
(Thackeray Vanity Fair, ch. l.c.). An unobtrusively ominous note is sounded when,
having flirted with Rebecca at the ball, George says goodbye to his apprehensive
wife and child but callously reflects on the social and emotional awkwardness,
‘Thank heaven that is over’, not realising that human contact is over forever. The
chapter ends, ‘The sun was just rising as the march began – it was a gallant sight
– band led the column, playing the regimental march . . . then George came
marching, and passed on; and even the sound of the music died away’ (Thackeray
Vanity Fair, ch. xxx). News from the battle is carried back to the town during the
fateful day, while the private imbroglios and fine dining proceed. In the fluctuating
fortunes, it looks like the British forces will be defeated, and reports come back
of feats of heroism by Osborne and Dobbin, murmurs of generalised suffering, and
acts of unobtrusive heroism which provide a gloss on the novel’s subtitle, A Novel
Without a Hero. Jos, afraid for the women and for himself since he realises he will
be mistaken for a soldier, tries to organise them all to flee, knowing they will be
‘butchered’ by the French forces, a very real prospect because of the proximity of
the town to the battle. At the distant rumble of cannons, rumours are rife, and all
Jos can do is simply drink champagne with feelings of shame and fear. When news
of victory comes, Thackeray’s narrator slips in his crucial and chilling climax
almost inadvertently with controlled, throwaway casualness at the end of a chapter,
as post-battle silence begins to fall:
No more firing was heard at Brussels – the pursuit rolled miles away.
Darkness came down on the field and city: and Amelia was praying for
George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.
(Thackeray Vanity Fair, ch. xxxii)
The narrator’s apparently wry self-exemption (‘We do not claim to rank among
the military novelists. Our place is with the non-combatants’) is multiply
meaningful, acting as an implied rebuke to others who focus on the heroism
exhibited in battle to glorify the dead and the cause, and also identifying Thackeray’s
own commitment to the lowlier but equally powerful emotions of the non-
combatants who must live with their own loss as best they can.
Military organisation in war has always been based on conspicuously over-
determined strategies and patterned ordering of formations: from the lines and
rectangular ranks of soldiers advancing in compact squadrons, to their crisp and
identical uniforms. The soldiers even have their ‘orders’ to follow in a different
sense, and obedience draws them into mirroring each other’s exact behaviour.
198 R. S. White
A strictly imposed hierarchical line of officers descending to privates contains, and

further coerces, the massed blocks into imposed relationships. The blare of bugles
and beat of drums add a layer of compelling musical drama designed to sublimate
emotions of fear into courage, and puffs of distant powder seem more an aesthetic
adornment than emanations from deadly cannon designed with no purpose in
mind except murder. It is astonishing that the assertion of extreme control in all
this preparation is calculated to persuade combatants to think that an adverse result
must be by chance, while success is part of a divine order. In reality, the result in
every case is the same and entirely inevitable, ‘mutual slaughter’. As each of the
writers – with their very different motivations in writing of the Battle of Waterloo
– make affectively and starkly clear, the ‘Morning After’ exposes war itself as the
exact reverse of order and form. It is revealed rather, as a formless and terrible
destruction of human order, forms and potential, with no purpose or pattern, and
leaving each family of a slaughtered human without livelihood, deracinated and
grieving. At the same time, however, in some instances such as Scott’s poem
and Turner’s painting, the order and form conferred by conventions of art and
driven by emotional conviction can create a higher order, a dark sublimity perhaps,
giving dignity, sympathy and humanity to the individual protagonists caught up
in the chaos.
Paradoxically, it is the formal arrangement of poetry into rhythms, rhymes and
genres such as ballad or Spenserian stanzas, and the rhetorical patterning of
heightened prose, which can most movingly direct, and heighten the reader’s
emotional engagement and apprehension of significance in the disruption of forms.
In yet another sense, however, as we have seen in the poems of Southey and
Wordsworth in particular, the poet’s attempt to impose a consistent point of view
based on an ideology can also be undermined and disordered from within, by the
imagination stretched in moments of dismay to break its own willed boundaries
and borders. A century after Waterloo, and in a very different war, Wilfred Owen
(1931, p. 31) was to write memorably, ‘Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
/ My subject is War, and the pity of War. / The Poetry is in the pity’. Among
its many available resonances, the statement shifts the emphasis away from form
for its own sake or the sake of decorum, to the unruliness of emotional content,
and the feelings aroused by war.
Notes
1 I am grateful to Katrina O’Loughlin for providing me with a copy of this text.
2 Byron’s visit in August 1816 was (somewhat surprisingly) reported in a letter from
‘A Sexagenarian’ in The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, on Saturday
6 March 1830, p. 4. The letter-writer asked Byron his opinion of Scott’s ‘Field of
Waterloo’, to which the reply was ‘I am sure there is no poet living who could have
written so many good lines on so meagre a subject, in so short a time’.
3 The ambiguity of Thackeray’s time scheme, hovering as it does between 1815 and the
1840s, is analysed by Hammond in ‘Thackeray’s Waterloo: History and War in Vanity
Fair’, Literature and History, third series 11 (2002), pp. 19–38.
Reference list
Astbury, K. 2015, ‘Witnesses, Wives, Politicians, and Soldiers: The Women of Waterloo’,
The Conversation, June 12: http://theconversation.com/witnesses-wives-politicians-
soldiers-the-women-of-waterloo-42648, accessed 5 September 2016.
Bainbridge, S. 1995, Napoleon and English Romanticism, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Bennett, B. (ed.) 1976, British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism 1793–1815, Garland
Publishing, New York. Online at www.rc.umd.edu/editions/warpoetry/1815/1815_7.
html, accessed 12 June 2016.
Byron, Lord 1810, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; A Satire, James Cawthorn, London.
Byron, Lord 1980, Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. J. J. McGann, Clarendon
Press, Oxford.
Cathcart, B. 2015, The News from Waterloo: The Race to Tell Britain of Wellington’s Victory,
Faber & Faber, London.
Cox, J. N. 2014, Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Culture in the Napoleonic War Years,
Favret, M. 2009, War at Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.
Gottlieb, E. 2009, ‘Fighting Words: Representing the Napoleonic Wars in the Poetry of
Hemans and Barbauld’, European Romantic Review, vol. 20, pp. 327–343.
Hammond, M. 2002, ‘Thackeray’s Waterloo: History and War in Vanity Fair’, in Literature
and History, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 19–38.
Hunt, L. 1990, Leigh Hunt: Selected Writings, ed. D. J. Dibley, Carcanet Press, Manchester.
Lockhart, J. G. 1914, Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ed. O. L. Reid, The Macmillan Company, New
York.
McLoughlin, K. 2011, Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq,
Muir, R. 2015, Wellington: Waterloo and the Fortunes of Peace 1814–1852, Yale University
Press, New Haven.
Owen, W. 1931, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owens, ed. E. Blunden, Chatto & Windus,
London.
Perry, S. 2016, ‘Waterloo and the Poets’, Keats-Shelley Review, vol. 30, pp. 57–62.
Roberts, A. 2005, Waterloo: The Battle for Modern Europe, Harper Collins, London.
Scott, Sir Walter 1910, The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, ed. J. L. Robertson, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, pp. 609–628.
Shaw, P. 2002, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination, Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Southey, R. 1838. The Poetical Works of Robert Southey Collected by Himself, vol. 10, Longman,
Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, London.
Thackeray, W. 1968, Vanity Fair, The Penguin English Library, Harmondsworth.
Watts, J. W. 1817, Narrative of a Residence in Belgium During the Campaign of 1815; and of a
Visit to the Field of Waterloo, 10th edn, John Murray, London.
White, R. S. 2008, Pacifism and English Literature: Minstrels of Peace, Palgrave Macmillan,
London.
White, R. S. 2015, ‘Victims of War: Battlefield Casualties and Literary Sensibility’, in
N. Ramsay & G. Russell (eds), Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture,
Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Wordsworth, W. 1815, ‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface’, Lyrical Ballads, 2 vols,
Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, London.
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Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Taylor & Francis
12
WAR AND EMOTION IN THE
AGE OF BIEDERMEIER
The United Service Journal and the
military tale
Neil Ramsey
Following the close of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

(1792–1815), European culture settled into what Virgil Nemoianu terms the Age
of Biedermeier (Nemoianu 1984). It was, Nemoianu argues, a decidedly prosaic
age. Coming at the tail end of the great outpouring of art and literature associated
with High Romanticism, the Biedermeier was an era when the poetry of Romance
was tamed, domesticated or disciplined by the spread of a commercial spirit and a
nascent middle class. Literature thus underwent a ‘reduction to scale, a lowering
of sights’ as it moved away from its aspirations to epic poetry and turned, instead,
towards the modern realist novel and a proliferation of literary magazines
(Nemoianu 1984, p. 195). In his more recent study of the British Biedermeier,
however, Richard Cronin has insisted that the literature of this period is also
therefore fundamentally shaped by a sense of historical memory (Cronin 2002). If
the period was being formed by the emergence of unheroic modern commerce,
it nonetheless also saw itself as coming belatedly after the great and tumultuous
events of the recent wars. Franco Moretti (2013, p. 177) has also complicated
arguments about the coterminous rise of the novel and the Victorian middle-
classes by insisting that what characterises the nineteenth-century novel is its
failure to align completely with bourgeois values. Basing his views on a quantitative
analysis, or what he has termed ‘distant reading’, of the vast corpus of adventure
novels of the nineteenth century, Moretti (2013, p. 178) suggests that the period’s
literature was equally driven by the continuity of ‘pre-modern traits’ that he
identifies, primarily, with war.
As much as Britain saw itself during the Biedermeier era as a modern nation
progressing towards a future of commercial peace and prosperity, it was also a
memorialising culture that lay in the shadow of war.1 One of the starkest examples
of this was the emergence in the 1820s of a sizeable body of military literature
dedicated to commemorating the wars, and which included not only military
202 Neil Ramsey
histories, journals and biographies, but also a range of newly significant forms of
soldiers’ personal accounts such as military memoirs, novels and short tales (Ramsey
2011). Alongside a taming or dissolution of Romance by the modern world, it is
possible to see in this military writing one way that Romance, defined by Ian
Duncan (1992) as the ‘narrative form of historical otherness, a representation
discontinuous with modern cultural formations’, might be seen to have persisted
within the modern nation. This chapter considers the publication and reception
of military tales in the leading military and naval journal of the period, the United
Service Journal, which played a central role not only in disseminating such stories,
but also in offering extended discussions about how they might be understood as
a species of literature. By situating military stories in relation to work on the
entanglements of generic forms in this period, the interconnections of emotion,
fact, poetry and prose, this chapter considers how such stories commemorated
individual soldiers’ suffering as a form of sublime feeling.2 On the one hand, the
military journal’s publication of ordinary soldiers’ personal tales, as opposed to tales
of the nation’s great heroes such as Lord Nelson, can be situated in relation to late
Romantic literature more generally, with its reduced aspirations in the Biedermeier
period and its focus on everyday life. But on the other hand, tales of war, along
with the commentary that the United Service Journal developed around them,
helped to establish a militarised aesthetic of historical memory that could redirect
and develop ideas of intense, sublime feelings for an emergent Victorian era, even
developing a basic equation between war and intense emotionality that could be
seen to underpin modern ideas of war literature.
The United Service Journal and personal histories of war

The United Service Journal was established when the publisher Henry Colburn took
over the proprietorship of The Naval and Military Magazine in 1829, which had
itself been established only two years earlier. Military and naval journals had first
appeared in Britain during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. They
were modelled on German military periodicals that had themselves been first
published in the 1770s and 1780s, such as Andreas Böhnn’s Magazin für Ingenieurs
und Artilleristen (1777–1789) and Gerhard Scharnhorst’s Neues Militarisches Journal
(1788–1793 and 1797–1805) (Gat 2001). British military periodicals included
a number of short lived periodicals such as The Soldier’s Pocket Magazine (1798), The
British Military Library (1799) and The Monthly Military Companion (1801–1802),
but also several longer running serials, from the Military Panorama, or Officers
Companion (1812–1814) to the Royal Military Chronicle (1810–1817) and the
even more enduring The Naval Chronicle (1799–1818). The journals featured
articles on various aspects of military and naval service, from reports of parliamentary
debates on military matters to discussions of nautical or military technologies,
accounts of recent military campaigns and information about military promotions,
regulations and courts martial (Ramsey 2014). They were also published as wartime
journals and thus saw themselves as not simply addressing readers in the military
and navy, but equally the reading nation more generally. As such they also featured
The age of Biedermeier 203
a range of patriotic literature, from biographical tales of British generals and

admirals, through to war themed poetry and dictionaries of military terms.
Being wartime publications, however, the military and naval journals were
largely discontinued at the close of the wars. The longest lasting, The Naval
Chronicle, ceased publication in 1818 soon after the Napoleonic wars because, its
editors claimed, there were no longer any notable naval events worth reporting.
The re-emergence of military journals after the wars thus represents something of
a shift away from this wartime role as such journals began to devote attention to
developing the professional and scientific identity of the military and navy. They
can in large part be linked to a broader proliferation of journals at the end of the
Romantic era that was central to the emerging hegemony of the middle classes
and its growing emphasis on the importance of reading and intellectual culture
(Klancher 1987). These developments are reflected, for example, in the Naval and
Military Journal, which announced in the preface to its first volume that it was ‘a
publication which should exclusively devote itself to the interests of the military
and navy’ (The Naval and Military Journal 1827, p. iii). Similar comments appear
in the first volume of the British Indian Military Repository, in which the editor
states that it was set up in order to provide a repository for ‘the honourable
achievements of the British Indian Army’ (The British Indian Military Repository
1822, p. iv). The United Service Journal likewise proclaimed that it had nothing to
do with politics and party factions but was solely concerned with supplying
information relevant to the military and navy as professional institutions (The
United Service Journal 1829a, p. 1). Indeed, the success of the United Service Journal
was central to the subsequent formation of the United Service Institute in London
in 1831, which was established in an effort to further advance military science
as a legitimate and recognisable field of study. Scientific institutions flourished
in the late 1820s and start of the 1830s. Although they had their origins in earlier
arts and science institutes they nonetheless operated with rigid disciplinary
boundaries and clear separations between science and the arts, divisions that were
reflected in the proliferation of professional journals that, as Jon Klancher (2013,
pp. 224–225) observes, ‘registered the increasingly heterogenous play of sociolects
– the discourses of emerging professions, conflicting social spheres, men and
women’. Intimately linked with such developments, the United Service Journal was
central to the consolidation of the professional and disciplinary identity of the
military services.
In noting how audiences were fragmented across late Romantic periodicals,
Clifford Siskin (1998, pp. 186–187) argues that a countervailing development
nonetheless also emerged in the journals as they began to take a keen interest in
the review and discussion of novels. Composed around the ordinary details of
national life, novels were stories with which any and all members of the nation
could potentially identify. By the end of the Romantic era novels had also come
to be seen as central to the very idea of writing, a development Siskin (1998,
p. 22) terms ‘novelism’ or the ‘subordination of writing to the novel’, and thus
novels were seen to possess an intrinsic affinity with the expansion of the
204 Neil Ramsey
reading public. Novels were able to define a national reading public by enabling
the diverse parts of the nation to come together imaginatively as a unified whole
(in some sense even filling the role that war had formerly played in unifying the
nation against its hostile French ‘Other’) (Siskin 1998, p. 186). Although the
United Service Journal was aware that as a military publication it could hardly
concentrate as extensively as other journals on ‘poetry and literature’, it was also
highly conscious of its relationship to the general reading public and their interest
in such material (The United Service Journal 1829a, p. iii). To some extent, this
literary dimension can be seen in earlier, wartime military journals (which included
poetry and military biography), while both the Naval and Military Journal and the
British Indian Military Repository continued some of this interest by including
biographical accounts of illustrious officers. The United Service Journal also included
biographies of notable generals and admirals, but a literary dimension to the
journal was principally formed by its inclusion of officers’ ‘personal histories’ of
war (along with extensive reviewing of such publications), which, the journal
claimed, would be of ‘the greatest value’ to military officers, while to the public
at large they would constitute ‘subjects of the most exciting interest’ (Blakiston
1829, p. 382). These stories, the journal suggested in the preface to its first volume,
would appeal to ‘the boundless and exuberant domains of fancy and feeling’
and would be enjoyed equally by officers and the public more generally, even to
‘our accomplished countrywomen’ (United Service Journal 1829a, p. 2). Personal
tales of war could be seen to have worked for the United Service Journal in a manner
analogous to the discourse of novelism in journals more generally. If novels helped
anchor the diverse audiences of the journals within a unified idea of the nation,
so military tales and their concern with the ordinary details of the nation’s soldiers
helped the United Service Journal speak to a national audience despite its insti-
tutional status.
Although the United Service Journal was the first military journal to include
soldiers’ personal tales of war, personal accounts of war were not themselves new
in Britain, having been published throughout the eighteenth century. However,
by the end of the eighteenth century accounts of military life were beginning to
draw on elements of sentimental literature, meaning that they were both increasingly
personal in their focus and also far more concerned with themes of suffering
(Harari 2008). Because sentimental literature foregrounded suffering, it had an
ambiguous relationship with the nationalist ideals of war. As Marilyn Butler (1981,
p. 31) has argued, sentimental reflections on war were typically perceived as having
an anti-authority bias, their focus on the suffering of ordinary individuals at odds
with the grandeur and political power associated with the nation’s wars. That
a military journal should have taken an interest in personal tales of war’s hardships
was, therefore, something unusual. It is a development that can be traced to the
unprecedented commercial success of two military memoirs published by British
officers in the mid-1820s about their experiences during the Peninsular War
(1808–1814), Moyle Sherer’s Recollections of the Peninsula (1823) and George Gleig’s
The Subaltern (1825). Despite drawing on sentimental traditions of war writing as
an account of an individual’s suffering, Gleig and Sherer nonetheless wrote in such

a way as to redefine the hardships and the horrors of war as a version of an
ennobling pastoral experience in nature. Campaigning with the army not only
allowed Sherer to enjoy the picturesque beauties of the Iberian Peninsula, but to
be uplifted by his experience of war’s privations. War’s ‘carnage’, he felt, must be
talked of with pleasure because ‘in the very peril of sudden and violent death, or
cureless wounds, and ghastly laceration, excitement, strong, high, and pleasurable,
fills and animates the bosom: hope, pride, patriotism, and awe, make up this
mighty feeling, and lift a man, for such moments, almost above the dignity of his
nature’ (Sherer 1824, p. 40). Sherer (1824, p. 40) concludes of his military
experiences that ‘[s]uch moments are more than equal to years of common life’.
Reflecting on his experiences with the army, Gleig (1845, p. viii) similarly saw the
hardships of campaigning as having been an experience of ‘piety and true devotion’
absent from the idle comfort of civilian society. ‘They who write and speak of war
as of a succession of horror, and nothing else’, he reflected, ‘know not what they
are describing’ (1845, p. ix).
Both memoirs were not only greeted enthusiastically by major review magazines,
they also inspired numerous imitations by other military and naval officers. By the
1830s it was common for reviewers to remark upon the growth of a popular
‘school of writing’ that could be traced to these early ‘experiments’ by Sherer and
Gleig (The Gentleman’s Magazine 1831, p. 68). The Quarterly Review even suggested
in 1832 that the United Service Journal was itself an outgrowth of this expansion in
writing and had become, if somewhat implausibly, the most widely read journal
in Britain (The Quarterly Review 1831, pp. 166–167). Colburn’s involvement may
well have been because of the commercial opportunities afforded by publication
of military tales in the journal. A considerable portion of its pages were, therefore,
devoted not to scientific accounts of war, but were taken up with reviews and
excerpts from military tales that echoed this celebration of war’s hardships, carnage
and horror found in Sherer and Gleig’s earlier work. The first volume of the
journal, for example, featured the anonymously written ‘A Hussars Life on Service’,
a series of private letters in which the narrator delights in the youthful energies of
his life on active military service during the Peninsular War. The first letter opens
with the narrator’s surprise that his correspondent should be less interested in
accounts of military victories than ‘our general mode of life while “campaigning”’,
but acknowledges that such minor details will be useful for the sake of posterity
(The United Service Journal 1829a, p. 427). He goes on to explain that hussars had
a particularly arduous existence on campaign because they were always riding
in advance of the army, being required to form picket lines, arrange forage and
scout enemy positions. Despite therefore being constantly employed in the face of
the enemy, the author is as resolute as Gleig and Sherer that he took instruction
and pleasure from his experiences, observing ‘that in danger and risk there is
pleasure, if not happiness’ (p. 428). So too, he notes that a friendly discourse
eventually emerged between the French and British officers, the whole contributing
to the emergence of ‘right feeling’ in relation to the war (p. 431). The author even
206 Neil Ramsey
goes so far as to offer his wartime letters as ‘the best philosophy of life’ for the
English gentleman at ease at home (The United Service Journal 1.1 1829, p. 428).
Other military stories featured in the journal similarly reveal war’s unequalled
suffering, even as they find some form of solace and consolation within that very
privation. The anonymous ‘Recollections in Quarters’ was composed as a dis-
connected series of anecdotes about the narrator’s active service during several
campaigns with the army. One anecdote relates the narrator’s recollections of the
night before the Battle of Salamanca, in which he describes the hushed, tense and
apprehensive mood that came over him and his fellow soldiers as they contemplated
the prospect of the next day’s combat. Taking a walk about the camp, the narrator
comes to a quiet spot, ‘as tranquil as a churchyard’, where he notices two soldiers
kneeling together in prayer and realises they are father and son (The United Service
Journal 1829b, p. 94). During the next day’s battle the son is killed, leaving behind
his father who dutifully locates his son’s body and performs the burial. The author
himself confronts his own emotions at the prospect of death during the siege of
St Sebastian. While he sees one artilleryman killed by a cannon ‘running him
against a wall and squeezing his bowels out’ he nonetheless insists that he was not
afraid but had, rather, a feeling of ‘extreme suspense and surprise’ (p. 96). War is,
throughout these anecdotes, brutal, heart rending and frightening, yet the narrator,
like that of ‘A Hussar’s Life’, persistently draws his reader back to consolatory
feelings of equanimity, duty, suspense and elation. One correspondent to the
journal complained that revelations of soldiers’ feelings in battle were deleterious
to the army because they contained implications of cowardice. The editors
dismissed the correspondent’s fears, suggesting that what mattered was simply the
‘truth and power’ that such stories presented to their readers (p. 108).
In a pair of sketches of the ‘Storming of Ciudad Rodrigo’ and ‘Storming of
Badajoz’, the anonymous narrator emphasises a broader commemorative element
as he writes of the appalling loss of life when the British stormed the breaches of
these two fortifications. At one point the officer describes meeting his comrade
during the assault of Ciudad Rodrigo in as much graphic detail as the author of
‘Recollections’ witnessed the death of a disembowelled artilleryman:
I went towards the large breach, and met Uniacke of the 95th; he was
walking between two men. One of his eyes was blown out, and the flesh
was torn off his arms and legs. I asked who it was; he replied Uniacke, and
walked on. He had taken chocolate with our mess an hour before.
(The United Service Journal 1829a, pp. 63–64)
The narrator proceeds to describe the desultory aftermath of the combat – the
ground is covered in dead British soldiers, including General McKinnon who has
been stripped near naked following his death. The narrator ponders the cause of
his fate, concluding that it must not have been from an explosion or his face
should have been ‘scorched’ (p. 65). He also describes meeting two mortally
wounded friends, Madden and Merry, after the storming of Badajoz: the first lies
dying covered in his own blood while the second insists he will die from a knee
shattered by grape shot. The story not only foregrounds the officers’ familiarity
with the shocking experience of suffering and misery, highlighted by the radical
disjunction between Uniacke taking chocolate and the brutal violence of military
combat that tears, scorches and shatters flesh and bone. It equally signals the
office’s unparalleled fortitude and courage in meeting such horrors, a courage that
effaces all marks of rank and distinction. The sketches conclude with reflection on
the noble qualities that thus found their expression in the sacrifices of the soldiers
at Badajoz, demanding of the reader ‘Look on those blood stained uniforms; gaze
on these noble forms stretched on the earth, and think on their agonies!’ (p. 169).
Narrating the romance of war

The United Service Journal not only featured military tales, however, it also engaged
in an extended discourse on the nature of such stories, emphasising in particular
what it saw as their unparalleled emotional intensity. In doing so, the journal drew
on a discourse of emotionality that had already been developing in response to
Sherer and Gleig and the ‘school’ of military writing they had helped launch,
albeit a discourse that had placed the intense feelings of their stories in relation to
the very fact that they wrote prosaic and factual accounts of their personal
experiences. In its review of the two authors, the Quarterly Review (1826, p. 407)
insisted that their tales of war were compelling in so far as they employed
‘plain intelligible language’ that ‘shunned affectation’ and recorded only the
straightforward observations of the writers. The Monthly Review similarly remarked
that The Subaltern provided a ‘natural’ picture of war that allowed the reader to
stand ‘side by side’ with the subaltern himself. It similarly observed that Sherer had
written with a simple clarity, in which he presented scenes of the Peninsular War
as though it were in a ‘in a camera obscura’ that allowed the reader to be trans-
ported to the scene of conflict (The Monthly Review 1826, p. 54; 1823, p. 132).
This plain and unaffected language was seen to be of vital importance as it meant
that Sherer and Gleig’s writing could clearly express an emotional intensity inherent
to the soldiers’ life itself, characterised as it was by ‘wild adventures’ and the
extremes of ‘human nature . . . the horrible and the ludicrous, the savage and the
pathetic’ (The Quarterly Review 1826, p. 408). War was, according to the reviews,
fundamentally equated with the most intense and extreme realms of felt experience,
meaning that the power of Sherer and Gleig’s writing came from its simple record
of this emotional intensity.
Their accounts of military service thus even seemed to reviewers to partake of
the poetic. The Monthly Review (1823, p. 132) noted of Sherer that ‘[f]ew writers,
indeed, who are not poets by profession, have the art of painting in words, with
so much vividness and distinctness, the various objects which surround their view’.
The same journal imagined Gleig as composing poetry like William Wordsworth,
reflecting in tranquillity on the turbulent emotions he had formerly experienced:
208 Neil Ramsey
the quondam subaltern, it may be easily imagined, looks back in a calm and
contemplative mood to the scenes of violent excitement in which a part of
his life was passed; his mind retraces them as it might the visions of some
strange dream; it seems as if he even wrote minutely, in order to convince
himself that he was not writing a fiction.
(The Quarterly Review 1826, p. 408)
In its review of Sherer, the United Service Journal insisted that his ‘“recollections”
. . . are truth, and his language is poetry’ (The United Service Journal 1829b, p. 220).
That the plain and factual language of a military author could be described as a
version of poetry is a development that needs to be set in relation to early
nineteenth-century views about the capacious nature of narrative form. While
traditionally understood in terms of the rise of the proto-Victorian novel, as
exemplified by the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen, the period is
equally characterised by formal experimentation that worked to redefine borders
between fact and fiction, realism and romance, even poetry and prose (Behrendt
2009, pp. 189–205). What characterises much of the proliferation of narrative in
the era is what Amanda Gilroy and Wil Verhoven (2001, p. 150) term its ‘generic
hybridity’. Poetry itself had come to be understood in the Romantic period less
as a species of formal composition than as an expression of imagination and
emotional intensity. Given its most famous expression in Wordsworth’s insistence
that ‘there neither is nor can be any essential difference’ between the language of
poetry and prose, this was an idea that had become a commonplace, as can be seen
for example in Hugh Blair’s work on rhetoric, where he defined poetry as ‘the
language of passion, or of enlivened imagination’ (quoted in Rowland 2008,
p. 150). The novel, in turn, could be seen as even more emotionally compelling
than poetry or romance in so far as it dealt with factual truth. Commenting on Sir
Walter Scott’s novels, William Hazlitt echoed reviewers’ descriptions of Gleig and
Sherer’s writing by proposing that ‘facts are better than fiction, that there is no
romance like the romance of real life’ (quoted in Gilory & Verhoeven 2001,
p. 149). This elision of generic distinctions around narrative forms has even been
linked to the emergence of a modern idea of literature itself in the Romantic
period and the association of literature with imaginative writing in general
(Rowland 2008, p. 123). As Jacques Rancière (2011, p. 184) argues, a modern
‘literary revolution’ in the Romantic period was primarily about ‘undermining the
distinction between discourses and destroying the opposition between a world of
poetry and a world of prose’. Literature thus consolidated itself around the
passionate intensity that circulated through the ‘bare life’ of ordinary individuals’
experiences (Rancière 2016).
One such version of generic hybridity, as Gilory and Verhoven (2001, p. 150)
point out, are the military tales that achieved popularity in the 1820s, and which
had come to occupy the pages of the United Service Journal because of their
evocation of ‘fancy and feeling’. Soldiers’ tales can be seen to have developed,
while clearly redirecting, a traditional association between war and poetry.
The idea that poetry could be seen simply as emotional intensity or passionate
language was itself, in large part, derived from a primitivist strain of Enlightenment
thought that identified poetry with more savage states of society, and hence with
societies that were not only more emotional but also more warlike (Rowland
2008, p. 122). It was a viewpoint expressed, for example, in Thomas Love
Peacock’s The Four Ages of Poetry (1820). Peacock frames poetry within a stadial
history of modern progress by reversing Ovid’s four-stage progress of society from
peace to war in order to suggest that societies not only progress from war to peace,
but that they thereby become ever less poetic as they progress. For Peacock (1961,
p. 569), poetry originally stemmed from the desire to celebrate warlike deeds, ‘in
which rude bards celebrate in rough numbers the exploits of ruder chiefs, in days
when every man is a warrior’. In turn, it is specifically because societies progress
beyond their warlike origins and towards a modern state of peaceful commerce
that poetry fades from the world, replaced, as Nemoianu suggests of the
‘Biedermeier period’, by a prose of rationalism, science and commerce. However,
a contrary view had also emerged over the course of the eighteenth century that
insisted modern developments in warfare, the use of gunpowder, science and
massed armies, were inherently unpoetic (Bainbridge 2003, pp. 123–124). Although
warfare had thus acquired a degree of sublime grandeur because of the vast
spectacle of modern battle, for many its very scale and destructiveness precluded
the possibilities for meaningful individual action that might be celebrated in poetry
(St Clair 2004, p. 287).
With the growth of soldiers’ tales in the late 1820s, however, war’s emotional
force comes to be seen in relation to the ordinary, the personal and the bodily:
the passionate intensity of ‘bare life’, rather than in the sublimity of war’s
magnificence and scale. War, however, is not rendered poetic because it preserves
a pre-modern heroism, but rather because of the way it presents an emotional and
physical intensity otherwise absent from the prosaic modern world. In their
emphasis on the emotional intensity of the soldier’s unparalleled bodily suffering,
soldiers’ stories even share affinities with a Kantian version of the sublime, in
which war becomes sublime through the operation of standing ground courageously
in the face of danger (Harari 2008, p. 155). Yuval Noah Harari (2008) suggests
that this is how we can conceptualise the modern soldier’s story emerging at this
time: that, at heart, these narratives elaborate an account of the soldier’s
confrontation with bodily suffering that is absent from ordinary, domestic life. On
the one hand, such stories can therefore be related to a democratisation of feeling
that Rancière associates with the emergence of modern literature. Rather than
offer celebrations of war’s heroes that Peacock saw at the origins of poetry,
soldiers’ tales record a reduction of war into the most basic elements of bodily life
and suffering that could thereby speak to the nation as a whole (Rancière 2011,
pp. 9–11). But viewed as sublime or poetic stories of courage, soldiers’ tales also
arrested what might be seen as the troubling implications of war’s suffering and
fear, even the potential unruliness of feeling in general that had begun to preoccupy
the proto-Victorian era (Faflak & Sha 2014, pp. 8–10). Tales of war could not
210 Neil Ramsey
only elicit the strongest emotions, they could do so without fear that such emotion
might disrupt the demands of national discipline and order. If there is an imaginative
element of ‘fancy’ in the soldier’s story, it is not to be found in a departure from
fact, but rather in the evocation of the extraordinary conditions that the soldier
himself undergoes, in which his real life inherently appears as a ‘fiction’ or ‘strange
dream’.
The personal tale of war, with its plain language and truthful accounts of
ordinary military life, was thus coming to be widely celebrated by the end of the
Romantic era as possessing the same sublime feelings found in the best romance
or poetry. The Monthly Review (1826, p. 278), for instance, observed that: ‘Such
works, if composed only with simplicity, truth, and common intelligence, have
an irresistible charm, for they blend all the excitement of romance with the
important realities of history’. The London Magazine (1826, p. 267; 1827, p. 108)
applauded these stories as ‘one of the most amusing parts of literature’, while
insisting that, ‘[f]ew people have more to tell than they who have seen seventeen
years of service abroad and at home: and few, that which is better worth hearing.
Military authors, we are glad to observe, are accumulating’. If it found the Naval
Sketch Book (1826) mostly dull, The London Magazine (1826, p. 173; 1827, p. 108)
nonetheless claimed that several tales in the volume showed a ‘romance . . . [that]
. . . discovers genius’, and in the Military Sketch Book (1827) a display of literary
talents evinced through ‘the force and reality of . . . his sketches’ (1827). Blackwood’s,
which had originally published Gleig’s The Subaltern in serial form, similarly
reflected that a true narration of life at war was more engaging than the ‘fine
poetry’ of Romance: ‘Dang your Spenserian stanza – your octosyllabics – your
long and shorts; your heroics and blank-verse, feckless as blank-cartridge – but
give us Jack himself . . . spinning a long yarn’ (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
1826, p. 361). The magazine observed that if a military tale is written with a
simplicity that could produce a ‘vivid and affecting picture . . . [w]e read it with
all the avidity with which we peruse a romance, and with a deeper interest, arising
from a knowledge of its truth, than ever a romance excited’ (Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine 1821, p. 181). By 1835 the magazine was even insisting that sailors and
soldiers’ tales – tales of the ‘moving accidents of flood and field’ – have an
attraction for every one because ‘[w]ar is heroic poetry put into action’ (Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine 1835, p. 957). In his faithful description of the British courage
at the Battle of Albuerra, where the British soldiers continued to fight despite
three in every four becoming casualties, William Napier had produced ‘the most
spirit stirring specimen, in any tongue, of the Moral and Physical Sublime’
(Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 1831, pp. 248–249).
The United Service Journal echoed this broader discourse of sublime and poetic
emotion in its own commentary on soldiers’ tales. Reviewing Sailors and Saint
(1829) a fictionalised story of a British naval vessel’s actions during the Napoleonic
Wars, the journal argued that naval stories were ‘connected with nature in its
grandest and most terrible aspects, with art in its subtlest ingenuity, and with
human enterprize and courage in their noblest achievement’ (The United Service
Journal 1829a, p. 67). The journal thus ranked the novel alongside Coleridge’s
Rime of the Ancient Mariner as an immortal story of the sea, arguing that nothing
can excite our sympathies more than ‘the details of a life exposed to such vicissitudes
and perils’ (The United Service Journal 1829a, p. 68). While the journal still
distinguished poetry and prose, it valued poetry not as a generic or metrical form
but simply as writing associated with ‘the feelings and the fancy’, terms that the
journal equally used to describe personal histories of soldiers (The United Service
Journal 1829a, p. 45). Extending such claims, the journal insisted that the military
life is itself an inherently ‘eventful and romantic calling’, while it suggested tales
of war:
Amidst agents and elements so pregnant with excitement and contrast, the
force of circumstancs and the operations of human impulses and passions
have naturally created scenes and situation in which every ingredient of
dramatic effect is powerfully comprised; while the disruption of ties, wide-
spread desolation, and bitter sacrifices and suffering, inseparable from the
conflict of nations, combine to invest reality with so much of the sentiment
of romance, that a double attraction and a deeper sympathy are attached to
a tale of war.
(The United Service Journal 1829b, pp. 502, 216)
It elsewhere concluded that a military funeral, the epitome of the soldier’s

courageous heroism, is far greater than the ‘most elaborate efforts of poetry and
painting’ (The United Service Journal 1829a, p. 503).
If the journal celebrated military tales as though a species of poetry, it also
reframed poetry itself around what it saw as the greater emotional intensity and
power of the military author. The journal articulates such an argument in a review
of Byron’s Don Juan, which the editors included in their hopes of contributing ‘a
few facts to the history of contemporary literature’ by discussing Byron’s ‘wonderful
poem’ (The United Service Journal 1829a, p. 221). But even as the journal applauded
what it termed the ‘splendid genius’ of Byron, it chastised his poetry by taking
issue with his descriptions and use of an unacknowledged source in the shipwreck
scene at the start of Canto 2 (The United Service Journal 1829a, p. 221). It threw
cold water on Byron’s intimation that the source for the scene was his own
grandfather’s narrative, while simultaneously discrediting the Literary Gazette’s
earlier efforts to track down the source of the scene in the published account of
the shipwreck of the Medusa. Instead, it offered evidence that the unacknowledged
source of the scene was the 1812 collection Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea, which
contained many descriptions directly paralleled in Don Juan. For example,
Canto 2, Stanza 45, of Don Juan describes sailors preparing for their fate as the ship
sinks: ‘Some lashed them in their hammocks, some put on | Their best clothes as
if going to a fair’ (quoted in The United Service Journal 1829a, p. 225). These
comments, the journal shows, were taken almost verbatim from Captain Ingleford’s
account of the sinking of the Centaur. The journal also drew attention to Byron’s
212 Neil Ramsey
erroneous deviation from this original source. At one point in his poem, Byron
states that the ship’s crew cut down both the foremast and bowspit in an effort to
correct the position of the ship in the water, after the storm had turned it side
on to the waves. The journal points out that the foremast and bowsprit are in
actual fact crucial for righting a ship in such a situation and so would not have
been cut down.
The journal’s strongest criticism is directed at Byron’s description of cannibalism.
Here, however, it does not fault Byron’s use of the source, but rather the source
itself:
We believe that the accounts which are given of men in this extremity,
adopting the horrible expedient of eating the bodies of their fellow-creatures,
are, for the most part, fictions. It is not solid food for which the sufferers in
such calamities yearn; but water to allay a burning and maddening thirst,
which renders the mastication and swallowing of any substance nearly
impossible, and therefore not wished for. This, upon a little reflection,
would appear to be truth; and for the sake of humanity, we are glad to find
this opinion confirmed by the testimony of a distinguished living officer,
who, having been with others in an open boat many days, under the most
distressing circumstances, states that not only were the bodies of their
shipmates thrown overboard immediately after death, without any
contemplation on the part of the survivors of making the revolting use of
them which Lord Byron and others have alleged; but that even some biscuit
which had been served out to the companions of our informant, lay
unregarded at the bottom of the boat, the sole agony of the men being
occasioned by intense thirst.
(The United Service Journal 1829a, p. 226)
A vision of the prosaic humanity and factual, collective wisdom of the navy is
presented by the journal in an effort to correct Byron’s treatment of the shipwreck.
On the one hand, the journal’s engagement with Byron’s poem resonates with
Nemoianu’s suggestions of a taming of Romance, in which, as Tilotoma Rajan
(2006, p. 490) argues, the period can be seen witnessing the dissolution of poetic
Romance by ‘the prose of actuality’, which is ‘represented by the novel as civil
society’s disciplining of romance that brings it into conformity with the practices
of everyday life’. But while at one level the journal disciplines Byron’s romance
with just such a ‘prose of actuality’ drawn from military’s officers’ accounts of
shipwreck, we are nonetheless removed from any effort to bring the poem into
conformity with the novel, civil society or the practices of everyday life. Rather,
the journal insists that experiences such as a shipwreck are the most extreme
events, that ‘the incidents which arise in such calamities as those in question, are
unlike what any other kind of human misery produces’ (The United Service Journal
1829a, p. 221). The journal thus applauds Byron for borrowing from the sources
of naval officers, arguing that he ‘did well to consult the very words of such
mariners as have given to the world narratives of their sufferings at sea; for of such
occurrences he could himself know little or nothing’ (The United Service Journal
1829a, p. 221). The sheer scale of these events is ‘not to be supplied by imagination’
(The United Service Journal 1829a, p. 221).
Arguing, in turn, that Byron’s account of the shipwreck is the most popular
scene in his most popular poem, the journal concludes in praise of ‘power of truth,
however homely in its expressions, over fiction, however ingenious and brilliant!
In being content to transcribe rather than invent, Lord Byron has framed a story
which will go down to remotest posterity’ (The United Service Journal 1829a,
p. 222). It is the officers in the navy and the military who not only understand
and record the extremes of human emotion and experience but whose command
of these extremes can keep their writing within the realm of the civilised, redirecting
the sad or the revolting into the emotionally uplifting. The review disciplines
the romance of Byron’s poem by displacing the imagination of the poet with the
sublime true tale of the military or naval officer. It appears hardly a coincidence
that so many of the military stories featured in the journal were anonymous and
anecdotal; they stood for a collective military experience, a heterogeneous multi-
plicity of voices that nonetheless came to one essential conclusion about the
soldier’s stoical endurance of suffering. The journal even concludes that the most
interesting aspects of literature are constituted by the writing of military officers:
When faithfully and forcibly depicted, the events and vicissitudes of war
must either exalt or instruct, by acting as incentives to its higher aims and
aspirations, or as antidotes to its inherent evils and incidental abuses. And
who is more qualified than the soldier, by opportunity and experience, to
paint man in his various shades of life and clime, and embody each variety
of moral portrait amidst its own peculiar landscape?
We will push our question even farther, and inquire what class of our
intellectual community has executed this instructive task with greater truth
and felicity?
(The United Service Journal 1829a, p. 44)
The officer’s experiential truth might transcend even the ‘events and vicissitudes
of war’, the journal argues, to emerge with the noble and instructive powers of
the finest imaginative poetry (The United Service Journal 1829a, p. 44). In writing
of his experiences, the military author even appeared to assume a role resembling
that of a national poet, producing work of a comparable vision, passion and
romance.
War, emotion and the modern spirit of commerce

When, at the end of the 1820s, Thomas Carlyle famously proclaimed that Britain
was now possessed of a mechanical spirit, he nonetheless also argued that Romance
could still be found, merely that genuine Romance must be looked for in real
214 Neil Ramsey
lives. Life itself ‘not only is Poetry, but is the sole Poetry possible’ (Carlyle 1847,
p. 2). In his essay on biography he thus turned his attention away from fictional
forms altogether, because he believed that biographical glimpses of human life
were capable of being, as Mark Saunders (2010, p. 79) elaborates, ‘revelatory in
ways that fiction cannot match’. Carlyle (1847, pp. 350–351) recognised that the
recent wars presented one such way of seeing this romance in the present age,
although he tempers his remarks by adding that they are only superficially
Romantic. He personally saw the expansion of military writing, ‘Tales by Flood
and Field’, as simply part of the innumerable and fleeting mass of publications that
beset modern Britain, a literary ‘foam’ with no enduring or higher reality behind
them (Carlyle 1847, p. 15). Carlyle’s remarks are a useful reminder that the United
Service Journal was, admittedly, making claims about military writing that seem
more than a little overblown. Yet Carlyle’s comments are also suggestive of the
ways in which military tales were thought of in the era, that soldiers’ personal
narratives of their real lives could be seen to capture an unparalleled poetic
intensity.
What was most important about the military tales, nevertheless, was their
preservation of forms of feeling, of a Romance of the real that now seemed to lie
outside of the prosaic world and its mechanical or commercial spirit. Moretti
suggests that we might see the early nineteenth century’s interest in war as the
continuing circulation of pre-modern ideals in literature of the period, despite
the rise of the middle classes. He proposes that even in its rise, the middle class
continued to need a master, and in this sense were easily led by the appeal of war
(Moretti 2013, p. 178). The military tale could in certain respects be aligned with
the rise of modernity and a disciplining of emotion around military action and the
military institution itself, but such tales could also be associated with a militarised
romance that might keep alive a military spirit among the British reading public.
Kant (cited in Harari 2008, p. 155) had noted this in his discussion of war’s
sublimity, that war lends a degree of sublimity to a nation, while peace leads to the
formation of a ‘commercial spirit’ that simply ‘degrades the character of the nation’.
It was a viewpoint with which the United Service Journal would have concurred.
The journal explained that it was not only designed to preserve military science,
but to ensure that the ‘martial spirit’ of the population did not disappear (The
United Service Journal 1832, p. 3). The United Service Journal was, in effect, developing
an idea of Romance, a ‘narrative form of historical otherness’, that could continue
to be operative for an emergent Victorian modernity, soldiers’ tales serving as a
vital corrective for the moral degradations of a modern, commercial age.
In her work on the First World War, Ute Frevert (2014) notes that literature
was equally a major site for the production of nationalistic emotion during that,
latter, war, a point that suggests some continuity between the ideas of the United
Service Journal and subsequent conflicts. But the way military stories figured in the
pages of the United Service Journal could be seen to point to an equally enduring
connection in the modern era between war literature and emotion in general.
As the United Service Journal disseminated military tales to the public and helped to
define how such stories should be read, so it also defined how the public could
relate to war itself. What can be seen taking shape in the pages of the United Service
Journal was an association between war and the modern ‘literary revolution’ that
collapsed generic borders and installed imagination, feeling and passion as funda-
mental to literary production. Emotional intensity was, therefore, established as
the very defining principle of stories of war written for the general public. The
founding of the United Service Journal signalled, on the one hand, that the military
was increasingly taking a scientific approach to war and that the military were as
much a part of modern intellectual culture as other professions. On the other
hand, the journal marked a moment at which the public, conversely, were seen
to have a connection with war that was now to be almost wholly constituted by
feeling and emotion. Even as the journal brought together a mixed readership of
the military and the general public, so it overturned generic distinctions to recode
war writing around a fundamental division between emotional and scientific
forms.
Notes
1 Looking at the wider European context, Pfau (2005) describes the era as a melancholy
culture following the trauma of the Napoleonic Wars. On the impact of war on post-
war British culture, see also Shaw (2002), Walker (2009), and Cox (2014).
2 On the significant relationship in this period between war and feeling, see also Favret
(2010) and Downes, Lynch and O’Loughlin (2015).
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Taylor & Francis
13
‘A POSSESSION FOR ETERNITY’
Thomas De Quincey’s feeling for war
Michael Champion and Miranda Stanyon
In this Work he is of no Sect or Party [. . .] He draws no Consequences in

his Notes; makes no oblique Glances upon any disputed Points, old or new.
He consecrates this Work, as a ϰειμήλιον, a ϰτῆμα ἐς ἀεὶ [a treasure, a
possession for eternity], a Charter, a Magna Charta, to the whole Christian
Church; to last when all the Antient MSS [. . .] may be lost and extinguish’d.
(Bentley 1721)
In several contributions to the conservative Blackwood’s Magazine, De Quincey

uses the phrase ‘a possession for eternity’.1 It may have been suggested to him by
his reading of Richard Bentley, the eighteenth-century biblical scholar and
champion of Anglican orthodoxy, who modestly referred to his own edition of
the New Testament in this way. The passage in question, quoted by De Quincey
in an 1830 review (DQ 7.129), unites several themes prized by the late Romantic
writer: law (the charter), Englishness (the cherished magna carta), the Church
militant, classical scholarship (for De Quincey styled himself a scholar and wrote
extensively about Greek literature)2 and a vision of eternity framed in terms of
textual survival. Silently, it also links these fields to war and war writing: as De
Quincey knew, the phrase ktēma es aei, ‘a possession for eternity’, was borrowed
from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Here it described the fifth-
century historian’s estimation of his own text, a history of the war between Athens
and Sparta. The presence of Thucydides in the passage complicates Bentley’s
claims, since Thucydides, like Bentley after him, in fact failed to complete his
work or to leave an intact text to posterity. De Quincey does not admit this irony
in his 1830 review. For him, Bentley was ‘the very Prince of scholars’ (DQ 8.5),
and his claim to noble impartiality was a heartfelt ‘grand burst of enthusiasm’ (DQ
7.129). Yet Bentley’s self-presentation could also be satirised as atrocious hubris
(one enemy indeed dubbed his grand scheme ‘Bentley’s Bubble’, DQ 7.129).3
220 Michael Champion and Miranda Stanyon
The link between the ktēma es aei and the moral-affective failing of hubris is
significant: it hints at Thucydides’ potential association with the failure of the
endeavour to write histories, especially histories of war, unchanged by the passage
of time. And beyond war writing, the ironies of the ktēma es aei might extend to
the failure of wars themselves to deliver the successes and advances, or the worlds
of stable and ordered forms, which they promise.
Our chapter explores this web of associations, examining De Quincey’s feelings
for war writing through his engagement with Thucydides.4 At the outset, it is
worth registering the peculiar emotional character De Quincey ascribes to Bentley
– his bursting ‘enthusiasm’ for scholarship. If it seems paradoxical to associate
uncontrolled enthusiasm with the controlled impartiality which Bentley claims as
his method, then for De Quincey this paradox characterises the emotional style of
the scholarly writer per se, and perhaps particularly the writer on war in the wake
of Thucydides.
Thucydides is central to the Western tradition of war writing, and one aim of
this chapter is to suggest the deep classical history of Romantic (and, by extension,
current) feelings about war. But more is at stake than reception history. By probing
questions of form and feeling through the lens of De Quincey’s engagement with
Thucydides, this chapter finds figures of a broader argument about war and form –
taking the latter in the broad sense of a repeated and recognisable ‘arrangement
of elements – an ordering, patterning, or shaping’.5 Much modern writing on war, we
might say, aligns form with goodness. Conservative advocates for war not infre-
quently view war as a good since it supposedly promotes order, cultural cohesion
and advances in technological progress; left-wing responses often condemn war as
disordered and chaotic, leaving the equation of form, order and culture intact.6 Our
reading of De Quincey points beyond both ‘left-wing’ and ‘conservative’ claims
about the allegedly true formlessness of war – chaotic, disruptive and terrifying – or
war as the stern, consoling teacher who gives rise to ordered cultural and emotional
forms. It suggests that we should rethink both the dichotomy of form versus
formlessness and the equation of form with goodness. We begin with Thucydides’
reception, before turning to De Quincey’s writings on war more generally to
explore the entanglement of emotional styles in writing war with views about the
form-creating or form-destroying power of war itself.
Thucydides’ reception: patterns and possibilities

De Quincey drew on contemporary reception of Thucydides to set up and
undermine contrasts between empirical, scientific, ordered, universal and detached
history, and its converse: war writing which is subjective, rhetorical, disruptive,
particular and overtly emotional. More and less ordered and controlled forms of
writing are thus aligned with different aesthetic and moral judgements about war
and its relationship to order. In the main, De Quincey associates Thucydides with
a scientific form of historiography, contrasted with rhetorical anecdotage and
cases. Yet instabilities in Thucydides’ reception helped De Quincey to play with
Thomas De Quincey 221
this contrast, questioning the identification of form, civilisation and goodness in

the process. Ultimately, his ironic texts put pressure on the idea, common in the
reception of Thucydides, that unemotional scientific historiography can truly be
opposed to emotional literary genres, alongside the idea that emotive literary
forms are the site of genuinely formless or form-testing outpourings of feeling.7
In this way, De Quincey encourages his readers to undermine, on one hand, the
pretentions to objectivity of supposedly unemotional war history – often the pro-
vince of pro-war writers – and, on the other hand, the implicitly anti-war claim
that subjective sincerity and the ‘true’ horror of war are revealed in those genres
cast as emotional interruptions of or refuges from severe formal discourse.8
The complexity of the early modern reception of Thucydides is clear in
method. From the enlightenment onward, Thucydides is taken as a model for
empiricists, offering a ‘true account’ of the historical facts of ‘what is real’, as
against historians like Herodotus who present mere fable (Voltaire 1765, cited in
Morley 2014, p. 45). Similarly, his history is ordered by the application of strict
rules: Rapin argues that ‘whatever Rules may be given to history, none can be
prescrib’d so severe than those Thucydides [has] observed’ (Rapin 1694, preface).9
Such a view enabled the co-option of Thucydides by champions of history as a
science.10 On this view, the Thucydidean historian, like the doctor, follows empi-
rical prescriptions with the emotional ‘detachment’ and self-effacing ‘reticence’
necessary for ‘objectivity’ (Cochrane 1929, p. 31; Morley 2014, p. 68). Such a
method was held to rely on moral-affective qualities including suppression of
feeling and personality: ‘a disinterested Meaning shine[s] in every thing he writes’
because he is ‘disengaged of Prejudice, Interest and Passion’ (Rapin 1694, p. 8;
Morley 2014, pp. 72, 82–83).
This view was encouraged by Thucydides’ own comments on method.11 In the
words of a popular Victorian translation:
far from permitting myself to derive [my narrative] from the first source that
came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly
on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the
report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests (para akribeiai)
possible. My conclusions have cost me some labour from the want of
coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eye-
witnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue
partiality [. . .]. The absence of romance (to mē mythōdes) in my history will,
I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those
inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the
interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must
resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written
my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but
as a possession for all time (ktēma es aei).
(Thuc. 1.22.2–4, trans. Crawley 1866)
The rendering of akribeiai as ‘severe and detailed tests’ speaks to the power of the
image of Thucydides as the detached empiricist. If somewhat overtranslated, it is
not indefensible, given that akribeia was a prized possession of the doctors of his
day, and Platonic akribeia distinguished skills based on knowledge from the orators’
mere opinion (Plato Philebus, 55e–59d).12 ‘Absence of romance’ neatly captures
Thucydides’ own attempt to distinguish himself from other purveyors of wisdom
– poets, rhetoricians, and logographers – for whom myth had a role to play in
historical explanation and political discourse. In this context, Thucydides’ claim
that history follows rules according to which the future simply ‘must resemble’ the
past is read as modern empiricism. De Quincey will thus sound a Thucydidean
note when he writes in his essay ‘War’ (1848): ‘The causes that have existed for
war are the causes that will exist; or, at least, they are the same under modifications
that will simply vary the rule’ (DQ 16.286). For many admirers, Thucydides’
principled method and his apparent view of war as itself governed by unchanging
principles made his History an ‘everlasting possession’.13 It offered an objective
analysis of society, politics and international relations which amounted to a cross-
temporal political theory in an empirical and detached mode.
Yet this portrait of Thucydides as the detached scientist was contested. Modern
writers also inherited a view of Thucydides as consummate rhetorician. Dionysius
of Halicarnassus (b. 60 BCE) had praised the speed of Thucydides’ narrative, which
allowed ‘full poetic licence’ and displayed ‘compactness and solidity, pungency
and severity, vehemence, the ability to disturb and terrify and above all emotional
power’ (On Thucydides 24, LCL pp. 465, 526–531; Second Letter to Ammaeus 2,
LCL pp. 466, 406–411). While the main line of the reception of Thucydides
departed from the view that history should be rhetorical, prioritising instead
emotional detachment and impartiality (Morley 2014, pp. 79–91), for Hobbes,
Thucydides is useful because he is an artist who ‘maketh his auditor a spectator’
of human truths through his narrative (Peloponnesian Warre, p. viii). Pierre Le
Moyne thought Thucydides wrote in the ‘sublime character’ most suited to
histories that treat grand events and must therefore employ an elevated style
approaching that of poetry (Le Moyne 1695, pp. 205–209).
This reception tradition could be understood as setting Thucydides the detached
scientist against Thucydides the sublime, emotional artist. But for De Quincey,
one resonance of this tradition is the tendency to equate, rather than oppose,
artistry and emotional detachment and control. This resonates too with post-
Kantian aesthetics, with its insistence on disinterested pleasure, and especially the
sublime, where experience is compartmentalised so that cognitive and moral pain
need not translate to aesthetic pain. Indeed, in the Kantian sublime, the violence
to which the faculty of imagination is subjected enables the elevation of the faculty
of reason, and the pleasure felt in judging sublime experiences (Kant 1973,
pp. 25–27). The scientific historian can here converge with the artistic connoisseur.
The idea of separate psychological faculties helps explain the personal feeling of
the nonetheless detached historian. Compartmentalisation allows the historian
both to feel with intensity and to write with detachment and control. The quality
of this feeling is, for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers, that of the
sublime: vehement, intense, enthusiastic, yet not aligned with everyday passions
or emotions.14 Thucydides might thus also be aligned with post-Kantian aesthetics
and distinctions between passion and sublimity, in order to advance a style of
scholarship allegedly isolated from the unruly passions, beliefs, and values of the
everyday. This is a textbook case of what Benno Gammerl calls a ‘detached’
emotional style of history (Gammerl 2012, pp. 169–170); we could also call it a
‘Thucydidean’ style.
Beyond his importance for historical method and style, Thucydides was also
drawn into contemporary politics by successive generations of readers. As the
historian of the war that led to the demise of democratic Athens, he could be read
as pro- or anti-democracy (Grote v. Hobbes), or as exploring how war puts
democracy under pressures it is not equipped to withstand.15 Thucydides also
provided stimulus for political theorists probing connections between violence and
progress.16 Since the early modern period, Thucydides’ analysis of the war’s
outbreak had offered rich material for proponents of pre-emptive strikes and of
war as an instrument of progress. His opening chapters detail the advances in
technology and social organisation associated with the wars (Thucydides, 1.1–19).
Thucydides’ treatment of the respective interests of Athens and Sparta became
associated with Hobbesian theories of self-interest and the rights of power, and
with social progress from a state of nature where individuals live in a war of all
against all, into a nation state where individuals submit to an artificial sovereign,
and conflict reigns between nations. In the words of a speech beloved of modern
neo-liberals and war-hawks: ‘Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that
by a necessary law of nature, they rule wherever they can’.17
De Quincey and Thucydidean history

By the nineteenth century, then, Thucydides was a name to conjure with in
debates about historiographical form and style, the value of democracy and history,
the connections between war and civilisation, and relationships between nations.
On questions of form and style, De Quincey typically follows his contemporaries
and portrays Thucydides as a forerunner to detached, impartial, orderly scientists.
Yet, as we have begun to suggest, this portrait is often undercut. In ‘On Style’
(1840), Thucydides is represented as the first writer of ‘stern philosophic prose’,
while Herodotus was ‘an artist’ who stood on an island ‘between the regions of
[epic] poetry and blank unimpassioned’ prose (DQ 12.32).18 Herodotus represents
a ‘splendid semi-barbarous generation’ while Thucydides is ‘experimental’ (DQ
12.33). Herodotus is a ‘son of nature, fascinated by the mighty powers of chance
or of tragic destiny’; Thucydides ‘was the son of political speculation, delighting
to trace the darker agencies which brood in the mind of man – the subtle motives,
the combinations, the plots which gather in the brain of “dark viziers,” when
entrusted with the fate of millions, and the nation-wielding tempests which move
at the bidding of the orator’ (DQ 12.33). Likewise, De Quincey’s ‘Appraisal of
the Greek Literature’ (1838) recognises Thucydides as ‘affect[ing] to treat [. . .]
[history] philosophically’ (DQ 11.23), in common with the main line of the
tradition. But he goes on to suggest mischievously that philosophical historians are
in fact ‘the corruptors of genuine history’ (DQ 11.23). Against the tide of reception
history, De Quincey laments Thucydides’ self-proclaimed lack of romance, doubts
his much-touted veracity, and questions the social standing and expertise in politics
of the Athenian general turned historian:
Thucydides, though writing about his own time, and doubtless embellishing
by fictions not less than his more amusing brethren, is as dull as if he prided
himself on veracity. Nay, he tells us no secret anecdotes of the times – surely
there must have been many; and this proves to us, that he was a low fellow
without political connexions, and that he never had been behind the curtain.
(DQ 11.23)
Drawing a parallel between the demise of the refined and ‘arrogant’ Athenian
empire on one hand, and the defeat of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France on
the other, De Quincey observes that ‘[t]here was something to “point a moral”
in the Peloponnesian war’ (DQ 11.23). Yet Thucydides failed to moralise. He
showed nothing of Athens’s ‘bloody abuse of power, or the bloody retribution’
of Sparta; ‘he is as cool as a cucumber upon every act of atrocity’: ‘all alike he
enters in his daybook and ledger, posts them up to the [. . .] brutal Spartan or
polished Athenian, with no more expression of his feelings (if he had any) than a
merchant making out an invoice’ (DQ 11.23–24).
Thucydides’ historiographical failure to moralise is also a mercantile,
ungentlemanly failure to feel. In the ‘Appraisal’, the only elements of Thucydides’
narrative worthy of inclusion in world history are the Plague at Athens and the
Sicilian Expedition (DQ 11.23). These show Thucydides at his most emotive,
conjuring up heart-rending images of suffering and disaster. They are also com-
paratively rare moments in which he includes explicit authorial moral judgements
– on Athens’s quest for power, the moral degeneracy of Athenian politics, the
instability of democratic decision-making, the virtue of the Athenian general
Nicias and the value of traditional Athenian political virtues. Given the existence
of these passages, De Quincey’s attack on Thucydides can be read as tongue-in-
cheek or at least hyperbolic. Yet it also intervenes in debates about method and
politics. While the liberal progressivist reader might wish Thucydides had been
more scientific and philosophical, and less absorbed by novelistic particularity, the
conservative essayist and autobiographer De Quincey purports to wish Thucydides
had been more anecdotal and passionate.19
The necessity of feeling in accurate historical accounts returns in De Quincey’s
‘Postscript’ to the essays On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts, probably
drafted between 1827 and 1839. De Quincey plausibly began the series as a satire
of gentlemen lovers of boxing after one prominent figure was found guilty of
murder, and its first ‘paper’ ventriloquises for a speaker at a fictional society for
the appreciation of murders. Nonetheless, the elaborate essays also suggest the real
attractions of violence and the plausibility of an aesthetics of sublimity or tragedy.
As a straightforward satire, the piece suggests the problems with Thucydidean
histories insofar as they are histories of social progress in and through violence,
and insofar as they are connected with Hobbesian ideas about human progress
from the state of nature into a less violent civil state, marked by form-ful wars
rather than shapeless violence. In On Murder, as we plunge into detailed and
concrete anecdotes of bloodshed, we see that violence holds an appeal an sich, and
that more structure, more theory and more civilised sophistication do not necessarily
mean less blood. In this vein, the preface to On Murder quotes approvingly the
third-century church father Lactantius, in a diatribe against the amphitheatre:
‘What is so dreadful,’ says Lactantius, ‘what so dismal and revolting, as the

murder of a human creature? Therefore it is, that life [. . .] is protected by
laws the most rigorous: therefore it is, that wars are objects of execration.
And yet [. . .] Rome has devised a mode of authorising murder [. . .] and
the demands of taste (voluptas) are now become the same as those of
abandoned guilt.
(DQ 6.112)20
De Quincey here cites a view of war and murder as cognate evils, which
supposedly-advanced societies perversely manage to formalise and enjoy. The
quotation from Lactantius links this anti-war and anti-progress argument to an
implicit critique of the aesthetics of tragedy and the disinterested enjoyment of
sublime spectacles:
Now if merely to be present at a murder fastens on a man the character

of an accomplice, – if barely to be a spectator involves us in one common
guilt with the perpetrator; it follows [. . .] that, in these murders of the
amphitheatre, the hand which inflicts the fatal blow is not more deeply
imbrued with blood than his who sits and looks on [. . .] [or] gives his
applause to the murderer.
(DQ 6.112)
By applauding, Lactantius insists, we make aesthetic and ethical judgements.

Vicarious enjoyment of violence – whether in the amphitheatre, war, or murder
– is also vicarious guilt. Feelings are crucial here: pleasure and exaltation, not
merely the act of watching, constitute an identification between gladiator and
spectator. Affect allows agency to leach from person to person, individual to
community.
In the ‘Postscript’, however, De Quincey suggests aesthetic enjoyment of

violence is inevitable and, moreover, separable from ethical judgement:
the tendency to a critical or aesthetic valuation of fires and murders is

universal. If you are summoned to the spectacle of a great fire, undoubtedly
the first impulse is—to assist in putting it out. But that field of exertion is
very limited [. . .] after we have paid our tribute of regret to the affair,
considered as a calamity, inevitably, and without restraint, we go on to
consider it as a stage spectacle.
(DQ 20.38)
De Quincey’s speaker hereby claims the right to appreciate the artistry of murders,
and particularly the spectacular Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, allegedly
committed by John Williams. De Quincey quotes Thucydides in imagining
Williams’s sentiments and artistic production. Williams only struck in London,
that ‘great metropolitan castra stativa [permanent encampment] of gigantic crime’
(DQ 20.40). ‘In fact’, De Quincey continues,
the great artist disdained a provincial reputation; and he must have felt
[. . .] the contrast between a country town or village, on one hand, and, on
the other, a work more lasting than brass—a κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί—a murder such
in quality as any murder that he would condescend to own for a work
turned out from his own studio.
(DQ 20.40)
This passage is counterintuitive in giving Thucydides’ ktēma es aei as an apparent

back-translation for the Horatian monument more lasting than bronze; but
the Greek catchphrase is appropriate for its links to the history of violence (for the
essays provide a mock history of murder), and to the archetype of the killer/writer
who remains emotionally detached from his materials. This is hardly a straight-
forward appeal to the model of Thucydidean history and the passage holds further
ironies. First, having ventriloquised for the ‘artist’, describing his works as
possessions for eternity, the speaker claims a need to retell all the details of the
murders, since they ‘belong[] to an era that is now [. . .] forty-two years behind
us’, and which ‘not one person in four [. . .] can be expected to know correctly’
(DQ 20.41). Immediately afterwards, we hear the murders took place in 1812,
rather than 1811: the chronicler has confused his chronology, and the everlasting
possession has faded like other sensations.21 De Quincey certainly does not play
the role of the impartial Thucydidean historian here, carefully checking and cross-
referencing existing reports. Rather, he admits that he was unable or unwilling
to make revisions to his first draft due to the ‘afflicting agitations, and the
unconquerable impatience of [his] nervous malady’ (DQ 20.37). In other words,
he lets his emotions get the better of him. His nervous affliction is warlike
(unconquerable), and disrupts the normal course of time: it is ‘impatient’ –

unwilling to wait and unwilling to suffer or feel patientia, a word from the same
root as passion, passio.
On Murder thus cites and samples contradictory images of the writer, spectator,
and perpetrator of ordered violence; for war and murder, as the latter is understood
in On Murder, are paradigmatic examples of order and civilisation through
violence.We see in the writer, spectator and perpetrator emotional detachment or
entanglement; his ability to give form to his materials; and their attainment of the
kind of formal perfection or ‘quality’ that would make them eternal or classic.
If Thucydides serves here as a placeholder for ideas of eternal laws, progress and
emotional detachment – ideas ironised if not dismissed – then he also serves in
De Quincey’s exploration of war histories as timebound, non-progressive and
emotional. This countermodel to ‘Thucydidean’ history is aligned with formlessness,
but has its own particular rhetorical form: that of the anecdote or case.
Thucydides contra Thucydides? Anecdote and case

De Quincey’s approach to anecdotes and cases responds to a complex Romantic-
era body of writing. Romantic interest in these forms has been linked to the
emergence of historicism, in the sense of a disposition to interpret history through
specific cultures and circumstances rather than eternal principles (Chandler 1998;
Fineman 1989). For Fineman, indeed, anecdotage ‘uniquely lets history happen by
[. . .] introduc[ing] an opening into the teleological, and therefore timeless, narration
of beginning, middle and end’ (Fineman 1989, p. 61). As De Quincey makes clear
in essays such as ‘Casuistry’ (1839–1840) and ‘War’ (1848), both anecdotage and
cases challenge the status of ‘general law[s]’, of conceptual and emotional abstraction
(DQ 11.349). Both are empirical, concrete, small, often apparently trivial and
scandalous, ‘rare and anomalous’ (DQ 11.348). Procopius’ Anekdota (or Secret
History) dealt in palace intrigues, the titillating goings-on ‘behind the curtain’ that
Thucydides eschewed. By the nineteenth century, anecdotes are seen as lending
novelistic ‘charm’ and ‘colour’ to history proper.22 Casuistry is ‘the science of
cases’ (DQ 11.350), developed to guide confessors encountering specific sins, but
later exploited when cases were published and consumed as entertainment, exciting
sensation and sentiment by ‘exploring guilty recesses of human life’ (DQ 11.348).
There are prima facie reasons to censure these forms, then, as well as to celebrate
the deviation they offer from detached history.
A telling example of anecdotage governs De Quincey’s autobiographical The
English Mail-Coach, or The Glory of Motion (1849), set during the Napoleonic wars.
Like On Murder, the piece examines violence felt at a spectatorial distance, with
its moral and affective implications. De Quincey recalls how the mail-coach system
spread the news and the intoxicating feelings of battles on the Continent through
the land – and through the body politic. One night, the mail-coach in which De
Quincey is travelling grazes a fragile domestic vehicle and almost kills its occupants,
two young lovers. De Quincey is transfixed by the sight of the young woman
rising up and falling back on her seat in agitation, her feelings struck as the coach
has been. He experiences a guilt that parallels his mixed feelings about spreading
war news. For alongside official news of uplifting military victories comes news
that is intimate and particular to soldiers’ families: news of casualties and losses.
The incident of the woman and her lover struck by the mail-coach is certainly
an anecdote – historical, momentary, particular. It is faintly scandalous in its spying
into the ‘recesses’ of a private vehicle to reveal a midnight tryst between an
unmarried couple. It also suggests a deeper scandal: De Quincey’s supposed
complicity in the grand violence of the state mail-coach service. The incident, like
those in other anecdotes, is moreover trivial: the woman has nothing particular to
do with wars or the state of nations, and neither does De Quincey. But for him
it acts like a causative historical agent of huge proportions. This is in fact precisely
the problem with anecdote as De Quincey will identify it in ‘War’. Anecdotal
history mistakes an ‘occasion’ or chance occurrence for a ‘cause’ of larger events
(DQ 16.277). Anecdotage thus distorts cause and effect. In the Mail-Coach, this
distortion symbolically disrupts progressive history and chronology: the incident
transforms De Quincey’s later dream life into endless play-backs of versions of the
woman’s imminent death, or her salvation in apocalyptic dream scenes. The
anecdotal form helps to explain this incident’s traumatic force in the imagination
of the narrator, its compulsive return as a symbol or exemplum, since it cannot
properly be assigned to a place in a fixed causal chain.
By making war a problem in this way, anecdotage represents an attractive
alternative to impartial history. It may be over-engaged, emotionally lurid, even
pathological. But it seems to show our conservative, often pro-war writer breaking
out – perhaps against his will – into more human, compassionate, ‘real’ encounters
with war and the pity of war.23 To emphasise such anecdotes is an understandable
response to Romantic war writing and De Quincey in particular. It affirms the
liberal notion that war is genuinely horrible, and genuinely resistant to the stylistic
and emotional formality and the form-orientedness associated with ‘objective’
Thucydidean history.24 Nonetheless, it does not quite get at the fact that anecdote,
too, has its conventions and formal features, and that it, too, is generic and not an
overflowing of spontaneous feeling. Nor does it get at the dialectic De Quincey
constructs between anecdote or case, and impartial history.25
The dialectic between emotionally detached and engaged literary forms can be
approached through the surprising role Thucydides plays in De Quincey’s defence
of casuistry.26 Within a series of examples, ‘Casuistry’ takes Thucydides’ discussion
of piracy and develops a general account of war’s relation to civilisation. Thucydides
reports that piracy was once ‘held in the greatest honour’, but developed into a
crime (DQ 11.356; Thucydides 1.4–8). Piracy, De Quincey observes, is natural
and just in ‘rude nations’ where the ‘Bellum inter omnes is the natural state of
things’. Whereas in the state of nature the norm was war and arbitrary violence,
as societies progress, violence is increasingly regulated by specific rules and
exceptions, which together legitimise the nation state. Only ‘amongst us civilized
men’ is peace the ‘rule’, insists De Quincey (DQ 11.357). And only among very
civilised men (like the author) are extra-state privateering and other acts of war
on principles of ‘commerce’ regarded as piratical and condemned. When humans
enter Hobbesian society, war becomes national and public, and is thereby banned
from the private realm of individuals – and by extension their commercial ventures.
Thucydides here appears as what we could call a historicist. He charts the
development of violence from norm to anomaly (or crime) as civilisation progresses,
and thereby charts the origins of war between civilised Athens and ruder Sparta.
De Quincey himself builds from Thucydides’ case (via Hobbes, who had translated
the Peloponnesian War) to more abstract principles. But the appeal to Thucydides
in this context also implies that his method was not simply opposed to the
particular, engaged and time-bound. If Thucydides is associated with the view that
the future ‘must resemble’ the past, and that men crave power ‘by a necessary law
of nature’, then, nonetheless, his generalities might be seen to develop from
specific cases, just as scientific laws emerge from empirical experiments, or common
law from precedents.
This is precisely the relationship between case and rule articulated in ‘Casuistry’:
that ‘all law, as it exists in every civilised land, is nothing but casuistry’, nothing but the
use of potentially anomalous cases to test, modify and generate general laws (DQ
11.348). Such a method implies its own kind of eternity and form-orientedness.
For cases are, according to the essay, ‘special varieties which are for ever changing
the face of [. . .] general rules. The tendency of such variations is, in all states of
complex civilisation, to absolute infinity’ (DQ 11.350). Evident in this text is a
tendency towards the organicist understanding of form so important to
Romanticism, which associates form with increasing complexity or structuring,
rather than neoclassical simplicity and stability.27 Form on this construction is
progressive and infinite, an eternal process or principle rather than a possession.
Casuistry furthermore entails a particular emotional style that De Quincey’s essay
aligns with British civilisation, morality, empiricism, artistic interest and ornament.
Far from casuistry being the province of absolutist Catholic barbarism, De Quincey
argues, only a cruel, arbitrary judge would ignore specific cases and their ‘palliations’
(DQ 11.349). Implicitly, a stance of mercy and compassion belong to casuistry, and
so to a general form of justice. This line of thinking is indebted to Aristotle, who
argued that the most general form of justice takes all the particulars into account,
and results in more lenient judgements than those demanded by harsh, retributive
justice, which, in turn, often leads to war and violence (Aristotle 1890, 1130b–
1138a). In Thucydides’ famous Melian Dialogue (5.84–116), similar arguments are
offered by the conquered Melians and rejected by the Athenians in favour of
realpolitik. The connection between eternal principles and cases is thus also connected,
in a long classical tradition, to emotional regimes of pity, sympathy and compassion
in attempts to moderate anger, bellicosity and brutal detachment.
The centrality of war to this historiographical model, implicit in ‘Casuistry’,
is developed in the later essay ‘War’. War, for De Quincey, develops through cases
of violence, and such cases build civilisation. The essay argues, against societies
for perpetual peace, that war is both necessary given the human condition, and
beneficial. In its course, it lays out a ‘Thucydidean’ argument that man’s self-
interest prompts social progress and formation.28 War, so the underlying argument
might go, prompts new technologies and stratagems, invents new laws, instills new
discipline in armies, acquires new land to cultivate, and gives conquered lands
new and better forms of government and commerce, drawing savages out of an
inchoate state of nature. In De Quincey’s elaborate version of this argument, war
itself limits war in the sense of simple conflict, by giving violence form and
boundaries, and it limits cases of war by generating international laws and treaties
which increasingly regulate when wars may be waged.
‘Banish war as now administered,’ De Quincey insists, ‘and it will revolve upon
us in a worse shape, that is, in a shape of predatory and ruffian war, more and more
licentious [. . .]. Will the causes of war die away because war is forbidden? Certainly
not; and the only result of the prohibition would be to throw back the exercise of
war from national into private and mercenary hands; and that is precisely the
retrograde or inverse course of civilisation’ (DQ 16.279). The alternatives are ‘inter-
minable warfare of a mixed character [. . .] infesting the frontiers of all states like a
fever’, or ‘intermitting wars of high national police, administered with the dignified
responsibility that belongs to supreme rank, with the humanity that belongs to
conscious power, and with the diminishing havock that belongs to increasing skill
in the arts of destruction’ (DQ 16.279). Without well-administered warfare, then,
violence lacks social, temporal, and spatial order and distinctions. Suppressing war
thus increases chaotic violence, while cultivating war limits and transforms it:
war has no tendency to propagate war, but tends to the very opposite result.
To thump is as costly, and in other ways as painful, as to be thumped. The
evil to both sides arises in an undeveloped state of law. If rights were defined
by a well considered [international] code growing from long experience,
each party sees that this scourge of war would continually tend to limit itself.
Consequently the very necessity of war becomes the strongest invitation to
that system of judicial logic which forms its sole limitation
(DQ 16.283).
The final result is a less war-ridden world order, but also an improved world
culture, enriched by militarism. As the essay concludes: ‘Gradually the mere
practice of war, and the culture of war though merely viewed as a rude trade of
bloodshed, ripened into an intellectual art [. . .] were it only through impulses of
self-conservation, and when searching with a view to more effectual destructiveness,
war did and must refine itself from a horrid trade of butchery into a magnificent
and enlightened science’ (DQ 16.288).
The dialectical arguments in ‘War’ chime strongly with ‘Casuistry’, where
colonisation through conquest was linked with uplifting and formative feelings:
To imagine the extinction of war itself, in the present stage of human

advance, is [. . .] idle. Higher modes of civilisation – an earth more universally
colonized [. . .] must pave the way for that [. . .]. War on a national scale is
often ennobling, and one great instrument of pioneering for civilisation: but
war of private citizen upon his fellow [. . .] is always demoralizing.
(DQ 11.357)
This contrast between ennobling and demoralising warfare blends moral and
affective terms. To be de-moralised is to be made objectively less moral (and so
less socially advanced). But demoralisation is clearly also a subjective feeling,
connected with dejection, humiliation and the nebulous loss of morale to which
failure in war is not infrequently attributed.29 Note that the ‘ennobling’ feelings
of war are public and national, isolated from the private sphere, just as the
exhilarating feelings of the detached historian of war are isolated from his private
emotions and interests.
Cultural-emotional formation through war comes to the fore in the later
essay. War here improves our ‘sensibilities’, ‘train[s]’ our ‘feelings’ and ‘the higher
capacities of [the] heart’, through ‘what originally had been a mere movement of
self-interest’ and self-protection (DQ 16.287). Not only does man become more
developed and well-formed through practices such as war; he also comes to
appreciate and desire form: ‘having thoroughy reconciled himself to a better
order of things, [. . .] at length he begins [. . .] to perceive a moral beauty and a
fitness in arrangments [. . .] so that finally he generates a sublime pleasure of
conscientiousness out of that which’ began ‘in the meanest forms of mercenary
convenience’ (DQ 16.287). War thus has a providential teleological function.
Unbeknownst to its practitioners, it works like ‘the benignity of nature still
watching for ennobling opportunities’. It eventually falls under the influence of
‘the arts of ornament and pomp’, becoming beautiful in itself (DQ 16.287). On
this account, war is instrumental to what Norbert Elias would later call a ‘civilising
process’ of increasing emotional and martial restraint, and linked for Elias with
increasingly elaborate social forms at court and with state formation (Elias 1939).
We stress the role of art and ornament here not only because of art’s links
with sensibilities and with supposed civilisational progress, but also because of
its link with anecdotage, a genre associated with literature rather than political
science, with entertainment, trivial pleasures, and chance. In stern philosophical
Thucydidean mode, ‘War’ explicitly condemns anecdotage and literary romance.
Yet, like ‘Casuistry’, the essay ultimately suggests the mutual implication of eternal
law and contingent case. Anecdotes, De Quincey begins, represent wars as
unleashed by ‘a point of ceremony’ at court, ‘a personal pique’, ‘a hasty word’,
the ‘momentary caprice’ of a minister or king’s mistress; they are not the stuff of
history writing proper but of ‘French memoirs’ and the discourse of the ‘lady’s
tea-table or toilette’ (DQ 16.273). In short, anecdotes are the product of a
degenerate, foreign, effeminate sensibility. They suggest wars are caused not by
the ‘eternal matrix of disputes’ between nations, but by ‘trivial impulses’, which
‘a trivial resistance’ might have diverted (DQ 16.273, 16.277). Even if factual,
anecdotes therefore confuse contingencies with causes. ‘All anecdotes [. . .]
are false’ and ‘all dealers in anecdotes are tainted with mendacity’ (DQ 16.273).
Yet, De Quincey goes on, ‘[a]ll history’ is in fact ‘built partly, and some of it
altogether upon anecdotage’, and so all history ‘must be a tissue of lies’ (DQ
16.273). History cannot escape from the realms of literature and personal memoir
into science or philosophy, from emotional engagement and accident into detach-
ment. Ironically, not to say facetiously, this gives history its saving grace:
Are these works then to be held cheap, because their truths to their falsehoods
are in the ratio of one to five hundred? On the contrary, they are better and
more to be esteemed on that account; because now they are admirable
reading on a winter’s night; whereas written on the principle of sticking to
the truth, they would have been as dull as ditch water. [. . .] dealers in
anecdotage are to be viewed with admiration as patriotic citizens, willing to
sacrifice their own characters, lest their countrymen should find themselves
short of amusement.
(DQ 16.273–4)
Following the general two-pronged argument of ‘War’, we could say that the
human condition makes anecdote necessary for history writing, just as war is
necessary for mankind. Moreover, like war, anecdote is beneficial, ‘often ennobling’:
an ornament and comfort of society, and a marker of civilisation. This logic
integrates anecdotes with the larger pro-war logic of the essay. There is a symmetry
here between the work of cases and anecdotes, around the axis of law and war.
On one side, cases generate and advance general laws; on the other, general
advances in society, driven by the ‘eternal matrix’ of international wars, promote
the flourishing of anecdote. Far from representing an unruly alternative to detached
‘Thucydidean’ history, case and anecdote complete a larger – and in an important
sense likewise Thucydidean – form of history.
Conclusions
Thucydides and his rich reception helped De Quincey set up contrasting accounts
of war and writing war – as detached, progressive, form-giving and scientific, or
as emotional, informal, anecdotal and literary. In ‘War’, the latter model is
associated with a liberal and sentimental idea that war destroys order rather than
propelling it, and should be abolished rather than perfected.30 Anecdote can be
seen as a wayward genre, and it is often self-consciously digressive in De Quincey’s
writings (indeed, the diatribe against anecdote in ‘War’ is explicitly labelled a
‘digression’, DQ 16.275). As such, it could be imagined as bursting out
‘hydraulically’ to show the true, personal and tragic nature of war.31 Against De
Quincey’s conservative attempts to glorify war, anecdotes would reveal the ‘non-
compliant’ emotions and scandals under the official logic of histories understood
as sternly Thucydidean.32 This opposition makes some intuitive sense, and resonates
with some current strategies in arguing and emoting about war.
Yet for the purposes of analysing De Quincey, at least, we should move beyond
this reading of a ‘true’ formless horror of war and a repressive or at best consoling
response, which gives war and its feelings form. Just as the history of emotions
insists on the non-opposition of feeling and reason, we need to unpick our subtle
and deep-seated assumptions about the contrast of feeling and form. In our
account, De Quincey not only sketches out but also undermines the strict
opposition of form and formlessness in warfare, and between emotional, rhetorical
anecdote, and stern, scientific history. In their shifting, sometimes deeply ironic
appropriations of Thucydides, De Quincey’s writings undermine a polar opposition
between form and formlessness in war, and between anecdote as ‘rhetorical’,
emotional and formless, and Thucydidean history as scientific, unemotional and
ordered.
This study raises more general questions about writing on war. We might see
three strands emerging from these texts. One is pro-war because war is formful,
associated with order and a civilising impetus. This strand predominates in modern
conservative or neo-liberal thinking. One strand, commonly associated with
liberal and academic war writing, is anti-war, since warfare is chaotic and destroys
order and sense. A third strand is more (ideologically) paradoxical, and more
postmodern. Here, form itself looks suspiciously like a kind of violence stamping
itself on things: as a response, we sing the praises of resistance to form, completion
and articulation; we want to end with the open, liminal, unfixed, undone, in-
complete.33 In our reading of historical sources, this can result in a tendency, first,
to credit past feelings about war, and forms of war writing, only when they ‘reveal’
the Formwidrigkeit of war. In the process, we can succumb to a hydraulic model
of emotions, where pity, compassion or horror, simply well up and get the better
of past writers; where ‘emotions’ undermine attempts to portray war as formful or
to give form to wartime experience. Second, reflection on war might be prodded
towards a double bind, where we both condemn war through arguments about
its destructiveness and non-formativeness, and yet promote special varieties of
formlessness in response. De Quincey might help think about this because of the
tendency in some of his writings to suggest that form itself can be horrifying and
violent; because of his engagement with classical and early-modern traditions on
which we still draw; because of his play with literary or generic forms; and because
of the way he undermines apparent distinctions between the formful and formless,
praise and satire, the emotionless and emotional.
Notes
1 De Quincey 2000–2003, 7.129 (= vol. 7, p. 129), 8.41, 20.40. This edition is cited
herafter by volume and page number as DQ.
2 His best known work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), is subtitled Being an
Extract from the Life of a Scholar.
3 De Quincey himself used the idea of a ktēma es aei to satirical effect in savaging the
Whig writer Samuel Parr, for him a pseudo-scholar and the antithesis of Bentley
(DQ 8.41).
4 We know no detailed study of De Quincey and Thucydides’ reception, though see

Morley 2016, p. 143; Agnew 2012, p. 93; Gummere 1909, pp. 34–38. Lee and Morley
2014 does not mention De Quincey.
5 Levine 2015, p. 3. The concept of form thus includes political and socio-cultural
orderings as well as literary and discursive patterns, and suggests how the discursive can
be imagined to reflect, shape, and disrupt the social.
6 See for example the arguments set out in Gat 2008 and Morris 2014.
7 The alignment of literary genres with emotion is commonplace. As Eagleton (2003,
p. 22) put it, partly ventriloquising for Victorian writers: ‘literature, as we know, deals
in universal human values rather than in such historical trivia as civil wars [. . .] literature
works primarily by emotion and experience, and so was admirably well-fitted to carry
through the ideological task which religion left off. Indeed by our own time literature
has become effectively identical with the opposite of analytical thought and conceptual
enquiry: whereas scientists, philosophers and political theorists are saddled with these
drably discursive pursuits, students of literature occupy the more prized territory of
feeling and experience’.
8 In other words, if ‘literature retains a particular power to take emotional understanding
of war beyond the limits and disguises of “official” languages’ (Downes, Lynch &
O’Loughlin 2015, p. 11), then this power relies on ‘disguises’ and formal conventions
of its own – in genres like lyric, for example, which can pose as outlets for the free
expression of thought and feeling, or like the digressive anecdote, which can pose as a
personal interruption of abstract rule-bound argumentation.
9 See Morley 2014 for a detailed analysis of characterisations and evaluations of Thucydides
from antiquity onwards, to which this section is indebted.
10 See discussion in Morley 2014, 42–44.
11 For discussion and literature on this highly-contested passage, see Hornblower 1991,
59–62.
12 In his Ethica Nicomachea, Aristotle (1890, 2.6, 1106b 14–15) uses the term to unite
intellectual and practical reasoning, which allows Thucydides to re-enter the fray as a
moralist based on the scientific accuracy of his account.
13 This is Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides I.22.4. See further Harloe and Morley 2012,
pp. 7–8.
14 John Dennis’s writings are a locus classicus for the distinction between the sublime’s
enthusiastic passions and ordinary or vulgar passions (Dennis 1701; Dennis 1704).
15 Hobbes claims he translated Thucydides to make people flee democracy (rhetoras ut
fugerent) (Hobbes 1679, p. 4), aligning democrats with Sophists; Grote’s Thucydides
champions democracy. See Pope 1988, p. 276. For the modern view: e.g. Macleod
1977, Ober 1998, chapter 2, cf. Ober 2010.
16 Hoekstra 2012, p. 27.
17 Thucydides 5.105.2. For discussion, see Sahlins (2004, p. 3); Harloe and Morley (2012,
pp. 13–18).
18 The contrast between Herodotus and Thucydides particularly echoes and modifies
Macaulay’s 1828 essay ‘History’ (1910/1968, pp. 2–12).
19 Note that the liberal Macaulay’s essay chid Thucydides for being insufficiently scientific
(Macualay 1910/1968, pp. 10–11) and regretted the defects of the French Revolution
(18); for De Quincey, the failure of democratic Athens is like the failure of republican
France: not a tragedy, but a commeuppance.
20 Compare Lactantius, Epitome Divinarum Institutionum 6, 20, 9–15. We quote the
translation in Selections Grave and Gay (1854), which includes Lactantius’ mention of
war. See DQ 6.122 notes, loc. cit.
21 De Quincey’s editors note that he commits ‘a number of [other] factual errors’ and
embroiderings of truth about the murders (DQ 20.37).
22 Macaulay 1910/1968, pp. 36–37. On anecdotes more broadly, see recently Loselle
(2009).
23 For Fineman (1989, p. 61), the anecdote ‘uniquely refers to the real’.
24 Cf. Shaw 2013, p. 29.
25 On this point, De Quincey would bear comparison with both Macaulay’s dialectic
between the literary/anecdotal and abstract principle within the ideal history, and the
dialectic Jolles (1930/1968, pp. 171–199) described between abstract norm/law and
concrete instance/exception within the case form.
26 The surprise is not absolute: Macaulay’s ‘heterodox’ opinion was that Thucydides
specialised in ‘deciding’ on ‘particular case[s]’ but could not generalise (Macaulay
1910/1968, pp. 11–12); Fineman (1989) provocatively calls Thucydides the founding
father of anecdotal history and hence historicism; Koselleck indicates his appeal for
exemplary history (Koselleck 2004). Compare Chandler (1998, pp. 163, 173).
27 Cf., for example, Beiser (2002, pp. 361–368).
28 See e.g. Kaplan (2002, pp. 45–46), quoted in Sahlins (2004, p. 3).
29 On humiliation and Romantic war, see Favret 2014. According to the OED, ‘morale’
in the sense of a ‘mental or emotional state (with regard to confidence, hope, enthusiasm,
etc.)’ was first used during the Napoleonic wars: ‘the morale of the old soldiers is shaken
very much’ (F. S. Larpent, Journal, 1813). In the following six examples, three concern
warfare, including one about the problems for ‘morale’ if a ‘soldier’ has to attack
‘citizens’, that is, if warfare improperly mixes the public and private. The remaining
examples concern other agonistic activities.
30 See especially the draft fragment towards ‘War’, DQ 16.514: ‘Most of what has been
written on [. . .] the cruelty of war [. . .], in connection with [. . .] the Old Testament,
is (with submission to sentimentalists) false and profoundly unphilosophic. It is of the
same feeble character as the flashy modern moralizations upon War.’
31 On the ‘hydraulic’ model of emotions, see Rosenwein (2006, pp. 13–15).
32 Cf. Downes, Lynch & O’Loughlin 2015.
33 Cf. Favret 2009.
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Taylor & Francis
INDEX
Adams, T. 16–17 Bannockburn 194; Bothwell Bridge 171,

affect(s) 3, 4, 9, 19, 47, 74, 90, 132, 176; Lepanto 6; Marston Moor 130;
134–137, 140, 225 Modone 27, 28, 32; Newburn 1, 17,
Åhäll, L. 4 145–159 (see also Newburn, battle of);
Airds Moss 172–174 Nicopolis 30, 31; Roosebeke 28;
allies 63, 120 Saint-Quentin 107; Salamanca 206;
Alliterative Morte Arthure 77, 79–80, Waterloo 16, 183–198 (see also
86–87; and Malory’s Morte Darthur 78 Waterloo)
Amadís de Gaula 113–114 battlefield 23, 29–30, 33, 184, 186, 191;
American Civil War 12–13 of Europe 184
Amiens 57, 60, 63 Bayman, A. 92–93, 98
amphitheatre 225 Bennett, B. 188, 190
anecdotage 227–228, 231–232 Beowulf 6, 40
anger 9, 16–17, 73; aristocratic 58–59, 65; Bible 163, 167, 173
languages of 57–68 biography 1, 16, 24–33, 91, 133, 138, 204,
anti-war 190–191 214
Aristotle 229, 234–235 body/bodily practice 2, 40, 46, 53, 77, 79,
Armagnac–Burgundian feud 57–68 94, 137, 168, 169, 183, 206
arms 58, 60, 65–68, 114 border 146–148, 152
army 66, 96, 98, 112, 118, 139–140, 176, Bothwell Bridge 171, 173
205–206; Armagnac 67; Covenanter Boucicaut: emotions of 28; and love 27;
145–150, 152–158; Royalist Northern see also Jean II Le Meingre
138 Bourdieu, P. 2
array 1, 14, 16 bourgeois culture 2
Arthur 77–81; and kingship 80; and pity Bourke, J. 9, 19
79–80; and wars 42, 48 Britain 201–202, 204–205
Athens 223–224 British Indian Military Repository
203–204
Bailey, M. L. 17 Burgundy, Duke of 57–60, 62–66, 68;
battle of: Agincourt 65; Airds Moss 176 arms of 60
(see also Airds Moss); Albuerra 210; burial 11, 40, 75, 85, 166, 172, 196, 206
240 Index
Cameron, R. 173–174 Dreux 66–67

Cameronians 164–166, 174 Duffy, C. A. 6–7
casuistry 227–231 Dutch 96–101
Cavendish, M. 127; Natures Pictures
129–130; Playes 127, 129, 131 emotion 1–5, 2, 4, 7–9, 14–16, 18–19,
Cervantes, M. 5–6; see also Don Quixote 38–41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 66, 68–
Charles I 145, 147 69, 74–77, 79–80, 84–85, 127–131, 134,
Charles V 59 136, 165, 168–170, 171, 213–215
Charles VI 59 emotional: attachment 43–44, 47;
Chaucer, G. 5, 7, 15, 19, 75–77, 80, 85, communities 165–173; cost (of war)
87; see also Troilus and Criseyde 97; detachment 222, 227; education
chivalry 5, 7, 11, 13, 115 131; engagement 7, 18; events 170;
chronicle 13, 15–16 experience 1–2, 4, 6, 15–16; expression
Church of Scotland see Scotland 18; forms 3, 14; intensity 207–209;
civilisation 221, 223, 227–232 life 2, 14; memories, collective 165;
civil war 3, 12–13, 129; see also American practices, collective 171; processes 76,
Civil War 79–80, 84; regimes 41, 51; register 2,
Cole, S. 8–9, 19 15; responses 11, 14; states 79–80; styles
combatants 11–12, 15, 18 220; socialization 3; subjectivity 9,
commemoration 168 14–15
community 165–167, 169–170, 172; Emotion, Politics and War 4
confessional 11; religious 165, 170 England 89, 91–97, 96–101, 98, 134, 136
compassion 16, 74–75, 77, 81–83 English: authorities 146, 149–150; forces
conflict 3–6, 16, 93–94, 96, 98, 145, 149–151
147–148
correspondence 18, 23, 107, 108, 110, famine 95–96, 98
112, 114, 116, 118, 130, 145, 152, The Faerie Queene 5, 192; see also Spenser
175 fear 9, 15, 19, 29–33, 63, 95, 98–99, 130,
Cour amoureuse 57–61, 65 134–135, 150–151, 159, 166–167, 198
Covenanter monuments 163–174, 165, feud leaders 58–59
167, 169, 171, 173; historiography fiction/fictionalisation 5, 16, 96, 102, 208,
of 167–169; see also monuments; 210, 214,
memorials Fineman, J. 227, 235
Covenanters 165–167, 168–169, 171–172 First World War/Great War 3, 4, 6, 214
Cox, Jeffrey N. 187–188 Flecknoe, R. 132–133
Crawford, Neta C. 4 Fontenay 66
Crocker, H. 9, 19 Fortune 44–47
Crusades 5, 12 France 45, 77, 81–82, 107, 111–112,
114–115
dauphin 57–59, 62, 64–65, 67–68
Davenant, W. 131, 140 Genoa 28, 32–33
The dead tearme 96; see also Dekker Gerhard Scharnhorst’s Neues Militarisches
Dekker, T. 89, 91–93, 95, 97, 98; Journal 202
choice of topics 92; and contemporary Gleig, G. 205, 207–208
conflicts 92; war writing 90, 92–93, Gohory, J. 114–115
96 Gondibert 131; see also Davenant
De Quincey, T. 18, 219–233 Gordon, W. of Earlston 165, 169–171
diaries 2, 8, 23 Gregory, T. 4
disloyalty 64–65, 157 grief 6, 14, 27, 42, 47, 70n4, 129–130,
Don Quixote 5–6; see also Cervantes 137–139
Index 241
habitus 2, 165 Lydgate, J. 73–74, 80, 86

Heaney, S. 6 Lynch, A. 170
Henri II 107–110; autograph letter from
111, 117; campaigns of 115; and McLoughlin, K. 3, 183
chivalric romance 110–117; letters of Malory, T. 79–80, 86; Morte Darthur 78
107, 110, 114; war correspondence martyrdom 164–165, 167–168, 171–172
of 112 martyrs 163, 165–169, 172–173
Henry V 5, 7, 10, 13; see also Shakespeare Massumi, B. 4
‘Histories of Violence’ 4 de’ Medici, Catherine 107–113, 115–116,
history of emotions 9, 53, 128, 233; 118, 120–121
methodology 169–170 medieval period 4–5, 7; see also Middle
Hobbes, T. 131, 135, 136 Ages
Homer 7, 8 medieval piety 46, 53
Hundred Years War 5, 16, 23 The Meeting of Gallants 96; see also
Hungarians 30–31 Dekker
memoir 4, 17, 18, 202, 204–205,
inscriptions 1, 11, 15, 165–169, 171–178 231–232
Ireland 5, 89, 97, 195 memorials: Menin Gate 11; Covenanter
165–178; see also monuments
Jean II Le Meingre 24, 26, 29, 32 mercantilism 93–96
Jean Le Bel 23–24 mercy 50, 51, 52, 74–76, 85, 187, 229
Jerusalem 48–49, 51–53 de Mézières, Philippe 82–83
Jewish peoples, late medieval 52–53 Middle Ages 4, 15, 41, 169; see also
journalism 6, 69, 89–90, 201–217, Medieval period
227–228 Middleton, T. 90, 96, 98
Military Journal 202–204
‘Killing Times’ 168–170 military: life 204; memoirs 202, 204;
Knights Templar 78–79, 86 science 203; stories 206; subplots
96–101; tales 202, 204–205, 208;
landscape 166–169, 171 veterans 23–24, 26, 33
language: allegory 68; chivalric 39, 119, militias 67
195; effectiveness of describing war ‘misericorde’/’misericordia’ 74, 75
7–8; emotional 18, 91, 94, 120, 128, modernity 14–15, 214
148, 165, 168, 171, 178; and love 120, de Monstrelet, Enguerrand 62–65
195; of soldiering 207–210; and Monthly Review 207
violence 39 monuments, of war 11, 12, 17, 137, 140,
League of Gien 57–58, 63, 66 226; Airds Moss 172–174; Covenanter
Lehoux, Françoise 108, 113–116 163–174, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173;
Libre qui es de l’ordre de cavalleria 5 Gordon’s 170–172; Horatian 226;
literature/literary genres: epic 5, 15, 113, Wigtown Martyrs 174–178
192, 301; English Romantic literature de Montmorency, Anne 107, 108, 113,
184; medieval 5, 9, 38, 54 79; novel 118
2, 18, 201–204, 208; poetry 3, 4, 6–9, Morte Darthur 79–80, 84, 86
15–17, 27, 38, 41, 53, 57, 59, 60, 128, myths 131, 132, 170, 183, 188, 194, 195,
155, 183–198, 201–202, 204, 207–211, 221–222
213, 214, 222, 223; romance 5, 8, 11,
13, 15, 16, 18, 24, 26, 27, 33, 43, 46, Nall, C. 3, 16, 47, 73
74, 107–121, 201, 202, 207–214, 222, Napoleon Bonaparte 184–185, 189–190
224, 231 Napoleonic Wars 188, 196, 201, 202, 203,
loyalty 11, 60–61, 64, 130, 153 210, 227
242 Index
nation 15, 140, 147–148, 163, 165, 192, Quadrilogue Invectif 83

201–204, 214, 223 Quarterly Review 205, 207–208
naval journals 202–203
Nemoianu, V. 201, 209 Rapin, R. 221
Netherlands 89, 94–95 Reformation (Scottish) 163–165, 171, 177,
Newburn, battle of 145–56; later 178
representations of 156–159 De Regimine Principum 74, 85, 87
New Statistical Accounts 174 ‘rewþe’ 74, 85
Nicopolis 28, 30–31; expedition 24, 32 Romantic era 203, 208
Romanticism 14, 195, 201–202, 207–208,
Orleanist-Burgundian conflict 59–65 229
Orleanists 57–58, 65 Rome 25–26, 42, 44–45, 51
Orleans, Duke of 59–60, 62, 64–65;
sons of 62–64 Scheer, M. 2, 165–166, 169–170
Ottoman Empire 30–31 Schiff, R. P. 49
Scotland 145–152, 163–164, 168–169,
pamphlets 89, 91, 93, 98 172–174; Church of 163–164, 172;
Paris 57, 63–64, 67–68 Covenanter 172–173; Kingdom of
passions 7, 9, 12, 18–19, 49, 58, 90, 112, 146–149
120–121, 130–141, 208–209, 215, 223, Scottish: army 145–146, 148, 152;
227; theatrical 128–128 commissioners 152–153; landscape 165,
peace 43, 52, 58, 62–65, 68, 81–82, 92, 169
94, 99, 101, 116, 119, 120, 133, Scott, W. 13, 17, 167–168
134–136, 153, 201, 209, 228, 229; sentiment 41, 101, 107–108, 110, 114,
negotiations 94–95; Peace of Auxerre 120–121, 171, 204, 227
67; Peace of Bicêtere 64; Peace of The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London 90, 94
Cateau-Cambrésis 107, 120; Peace of Shakespeare 5, 10, 13, 14, 128
Chartres 62; Peace of God movement Sherer, M. 205, 207–208
40–41 Sherman, S. 2
Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry 191 Shields, A. 163–164
pestilence 95–96 Shoemaker’s Holiday 90, 93, 96–97; see also
Philip of Burgundy 59–62, 64–65 Dekker
Pintoin, M. 61–62, 66–68 The Siege of Jerusalem 48–54, 53
pity 16, 27, 31, 39, 40, 47, 49–53, 73–80, soldiers 6, 8, 9, 11–12, 13, 40, 67–68, 93,
156, 198, 228, 233; politics of 81–85 97, 99–100, 102, 150–151, 202, 204,
plague 91, 93, 95 206–211, 213–214, 228; Christian 167,
Plamper, J. 3 173; returning 99, 102
Playes 127–141, 133–134; see also soul 9, 10, 135–136, 157, 173, 189
Cavendish Spain 89, 94–96
poetry 3, 4, 6–9, 15–17, 27, 38, 41, Spenser, E. 5; see also The Faerie Queene
53, 57, 59, 60, 128, 155, 183–198, Stendhal 15
201–202, 204, 207–211, 213, 214, Sterne, L. 8; see also Tristram Shandy
222, 223; British War Poetry 188;
celebratory poetry 188; see also theatres 127–128, 131–134, 136; theatrical
Waterloo, poetry of practices 131–132
de Poitiers, Diane 107, 108, 110–121 Thebes 75
prose 110, 113, 114, 120, 134, 184, 186, Theseus 75–77, 79–81, 85–87
191, 196, 198, 202, 208–210, 212, Thomson’s Martyr Graves of Scotland 168
223 Thucydides 220–224, 226–229, 232–235;
Protesilaus 73–74 historiographical failure 224; reception
Index 243
220, 234; Thucydidean history 221, 223, Wace 78

225–227, 232–233 warfare 3–5, 11, 16, 38–39, 43–45, 92–93,
trade 92–94; and war 93–96 97, 233, 235
Tristram Shandy 8; see also Sterne Wars of the Roses 5
Troilus and Criseyde 5; see also Chaucer Waterloo 183–185, 187–191; poetry of
183–198
United Service Journal 201–208; and personal Watts, J. W. 184–187
histories of war 202 weeping 8, 73–74, 75, 77, 79, 85–86,
97, 98, 100, 127–128, 134, 137–139,
Venetians 26–28, 32 171
vengeance 16, 26, 39, 47, 52, 66, 68, 74, Wellington 184–185, 188
79, 81; divine 48–50 Wigtown Martyrs 165, 169, 174–178
violence 6, 15–16, 19, 38, 40, 44–45, women 75–77, 79, 82, 163, 170, 172–174,
47–48, 52, 74–75, 79–84, 184, 222–223, 228; as martyrs 174
225–230; and actions 39, 53; and Wordsworth, W. 189–191
compassion 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, A Worke for Armourers 90, 93–96, 98;
87; interpretation of medieval 40; see also Dekker
subjective 58–59, 62; work 48
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WRITING WAR IN BRITAIN

AND FRANCE, 1370–1854

Stephanie Downes is an honorary fellow at the University of Melbourne. She

Katrina O’Loughlin is Lecturer in English: Romantic and Nineteenth-Century

War in the Iberian Peninsula, 700–1600

Writing War in Britain and France, 1370–1854: A History of Emotions

Edited by Stephanie Downes,

Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

ISBN: 9781138219168 (hbk)

List of ﬁgures vii

1 ‘In form of war’: war and emotional formation in European

2 Confessing the emotions of war in the Late Middle Ages:

3 Emotion and medieval ‘violence’: the Alliterative

4 The Armagnac-Burgundian feud and the languages of anger 57

5 Violent compassion in late medieval writing 73

6 ‘Thus of War, a Paradox I write’: Thomas Dekker and a

7 Corresponding romances: Henri II and the last campaigns

8 Bellicose passions in Margaret Cavendish’s Playes (1662) 127

9 ‘At Newburn foord, where brave Scots past the Tine’:

10 ‘This humble monument of guiltless Blood’: the emotional

11 Paradoxes of form and chaos in the poetry of Waterloo 183

12 War and emotion in the age of Biedermeier: the United

13 ‘A possession for eternity’: Thomas De Quincey’s feeling

7.1 Autograph letter from Henri II to Diane de Poitiers [nd]. 111

Susan Broomhall is Professor of History at The University of Western Australia,

Dolly MacKinnon, an Associate Professor in History at The University of

Catherine Nall is senior lecturer in medieval literature at Royal Holloway,

Dr Neil Ramsey is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of

Miranda Stanyon is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at King’s College

Craig Taylor is a Reader in Medieval History at the University of York. He is

Robert White is Winthrop Professor in English and Cultural Studies at the

Stephanie Downes and Andrew Lynch

I. ‘In form of war’

[t]he formulation of thought is different when one is moving a pen across

Aspects of this idea of the formal repertoires of emotion, ‘somewhere between

II. War, history and writing

a certain amount of distance – whether physical or temporal – from the conﬂict

III. War literature as emotional tradition

A Geat woman too sang out in grief;

IV. ‘If poetry could truly tell it backwards’

Implicit in Duffy’s provisional opening is the failure of form to represent war, or

ﬁghting, by complicating or even disabling some expected emotional attachments

V. War writing and emotional subjectivities

VI. Sacred emotions of war

traditional discourses of honour, loyal fellowship, courage, suffering and sacriﬁce.

VII. War genres, emotion and historical periodicity

modernity as emotional polyphony in war writing. Yet prescriptive and linear

studies of generic, historiographical and performance traditions of the emotions

modern period as a speciﬁcally political form of violent or chaotic upheaval

Modern military historians have become increasingly interested in the combat

and which were ﬁrst foreshadowed by the unusual autobiographical Le Jouvencel

by a number of renowned knights and gallant noblemen who themselves

Thus rit [rides] this duc, thus rit this conquerour,

Prudence’s critique of ‘violence’ ﬁnds no place here because in this kind of

the contours of our emotional world have been shaped by institutions . . .

I. The Alliterative Morte Arthure

Now grete glorious God through grace of Himselven

And I shall tell you a tale that trew is and noble

‘King, thou carpes [complain] for nought, by Criste that me made!

‘Thou has shed much blood and shalkes destroyed,

References here to Arthur’s arrogance and sinfulness, and to his campaigns as an

‘It were worthy to be shrede [clothed] and shrined in gold,

‘We shall end this day als excellent knightes,